As we move into Memorial Day weekend, many of us are preparing for the unofficial beginning of summer — backyard barbecues, paper plates balanced precariously on folding tables, children running through sprinklers, and at least one person insisting they alone possess the sacred knowledge required to operate a grill.
Memorial Day is a day of remembrance, a time to honor those who died in military service. Yet my grandfather firmly believed the joy mattered too. The gathering. The laughter. The freedom to enjoy an ordinary afternoon with people we love. In his mind, those things were not distractions from remembrance; they were part of it. They were part of what people fought and died to protect.
I think about that often this time of year.
Memorial Day is symbolized by poppies — delicate flowers blooming in places marked by loss. The famous red memorial poppy became associated with remembrance after World War I, when they appeared across scarred battlefields in Europe. They became a reminder that even devastated ground could hold life again.
Truthfully, though, I have always loved California poppies more.
They are bright and stubborn and almost impossibly cheerful, appearing in brilliant swaths of orange after dry seasons and difficult weather. They look like sunshine decided to become a flower. They do not erase hardship. They simply bloom anyway.
Perhaps that is why they make me think of caregivers.
Caregiving changes the landscape of a life. It reshapes routines, priorities, relationships, and even the way we experience holidays. Many caregivers know what it means to hold joy and grief in the same space. We celebrate birthdays while quietly tracking medications. We gather for holidays while mentally calculating whether Aunt Linda’s potato salad has been sitting in the sun long enough to qualify as a public health concern.
Memory lives in ordinary moments.
A favorite recipe made one more time. A cardigan still hanging on the back of a chair. A song that catches us off guard in the grocery store and suddenly turns “quick errand” into “unexpected emotional journey next to the canned soup.”
Caregiving communities understand deeply that remembrance is not confined to cemeteries or ceremonies. We carry people forward in stories, habits, gestures, recipes, and routines.
Still, life continues.
The remarkable thing about poppies is that they bloom not because the ground was untouched, but because something endured. Their beauty is connected to survival.
Caregivers understand that kind of resilience.
Not the dramatic kind celebrated in movies, but the quieter form: making coffee before dawn after a difficult night, sitting beside someone in silence, laughing unexpectedly in the middle of a hard season, planting flowers anyway.
Perhaps that is part of remembrance too.
This Memorial Day weekend, while the grills are lit and the grocery stores are crowded with watermelon, hot dog buns, and someone panic-buying twelve bags of ice, perhaps we can allow ourselves to hold both things at once: gratitude for those who came before us, and gratitude for the ordinary beauty of continuing forward.
Like poppies after a long dry season, joy returning does not mean hardship never happened.
It means something living found a way to bloom again.
Improv Invitation: Carry someone forward this weekend in a story, a recipe, a ritual, or a moment of joy.
Love the invitation to ‘carry someone forward this weekend’. Grandma’s potato salad beckons…
Thank you! I hope it tastes amazing.