https://michaelbarnicle.substack.com/p/memorial-day
Three weeks later my grandmother, Hannah Fitzgerald Barnicle, sat on the stoop of our house accompanied by her parish priest and a Western Union employee. She held a telegram from the War Department notifying her that Lt. Gerald J. Barnicle was missing in action. In late July she received another telegram notifying her that her youngest son had been killed in action.
Hannah Fitzgerald Barnicle, born and raised in Cork, Ireland, emigrated to the United States in 1916. She died in 1961 at 84. She witnessed two world wars, suffered through a depression, lost twin daughters aged one, her husband in 1936, her oldest son Francis in 1941, went to Mass every day of her life and always, till the day she died, held out the futile hope - a dream really - that Gerald would return home some day.
For her, every day was Memorial Day because the root of the word is memory. Like so many other parents touched with the grief, the shock, the tears and toll of burying a child she never got over his loss and never lived another day without thinking about her brave boy.