"Memorial Day and the Work of Remembering" | May 24, 2026

Memorial Day can feel like a switch flips and suddenly it’s summer, but we don’t want the holiday to become just another weekend that disappears into the blur. In this episode, we talk about the pace of time and the quiet danger of sleepwalking through our days, when everything is “busy” yet almost nothing is remembered. If we don’t pause on purpose, the moments that should shape us can slide into forgetfulness, and we end up losing not just details, but meaning.

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Father Don Wolf is a priest of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City. Living Catholic also broadcasts on Oklahoma Catholic Radio several times per week, with new episodes airing every Sunday.

Transcript

Welcome And Memorial Day Mood

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This is living Catholic faith with Father Donald. Cousins in my life and finally hopefully Father Don Wolf.

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Welcome, Oklahoma, to Living Catholic. I'm Monsignor Don Wolf, pastor of Sacred Heart Parish and rector of the shrine of Blessed Stanley Rother, and here we are already at Memorial Day, the traditional opening day of summer. The ceaseless breaking of the tides of time has brought us to the brink of this season already. Hard to believe another year has passed again so quickly. School has ended, summer vacations are already beginning, and we're gearing up for the longer days and the shorter nights and the rougher weather that marks this time. There's always a poignancy about this date as we stand on the precipice of summertime. So much happens that defines our lives during these days of sunshine that we tend to mark our lives by their arrival. Once the season comes upon us, it's time to appreciate how much the years mean to us, which makes the weekend of Memorial Day even more important and meaningful. Setting

Why We Must Pause To Remember

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aside a time in order to remember is exactly the most important thing to do in order to interrupt the flow of time and allow us to capture a bit of what's meaningful to us. We're built for the passing of the days. Time going by is as natural to us as the sunrise. Unless we pause to notice, unless we halt the endless, easy passing across the squares of the calendars, we're liable not to remember anything that matters. We could even forget that time does pass and then be caught up short trying to remember the when and the how long of our lives. And once we do that, we easily forget also the why and the wherefore. Remembering is premium for us. The truth of the matter is that life is complicated and full of things. One after the other, the events of our day come at us without cease. Every day is full of challenges and concerns. No one is allowed to separate himself from the complications of the moment because they're ceaseless. It may be the case that we become bored and restless because nothing new is happening, but that's only a commentary on our capacity to become accustomed to the patterns of life. The truth of the matter is that every hour is filled with sensations and inputs and memories until we're surfit and overwhelmed. We have to sort out what matters and what we can ignore as we go through the day, or else we're paralyzed by the overwhelming truths that surround us. Getting through the day, even the most ordinary and unexciting day we can imagine, is a negotiation with what we experience, what we expect, what we know, what we want, and how we will and how we won't respond. Each sensation demands an evaluation, and each moment of measure is a yardstick concerning what's doable and what we desire. There are no meaningless days or empty times. It's true if we can spend our hours wearied and unaware. The patterns of our lives can become so set and so overwhelming in their power to control our responses that we eventually grow bored with what's there and what we can do. But the raw sensations and the source of memory continue to bombard us long after the patterns of our lives cause us to sleepwalk through life. Every day is a stream of novelty and revelation, an endless source of what we're invited to know and understand. Which is why our days can pass so effortlessly. Our full-time notice is required simply to pay attention to what's going on in our presence. Haven't you spent a day or a week filled to the brim with things to do and matters to take care of, and then when it's over, can't really focus on any one thing you did? It all runs together into a jumble of activities and worries until life is like a glass filled and then gushing over. It just can't contain anymore. So unless we pause, unless we stake out of time and make some sort of big deal out of it, the time will get away from us. The truth of the matter is that until we mark off our calendar and then invest some energy into remembering, whatever happens in our lives can slide off the table of time and be lost to us. There are a thousand jokes made, of course, about forgetting anniversaries and foregoing birthdays, but we have to face the reality that unless we make a big deal about those moments, there would be no acknowledgement of them at all. Satchel

Time Obsession And Lost Days

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Page was quoted as saying, How old are you when you don't know how old you are? It wasn't just a philosophical question, it was the product of his environment in which his birth was never recorded. With no way to affirm what year he was in fact born, no one could acknowledge what his age was. He was the man he was, and all he did was attributed truly and without question to him, but without the peg upon which to hang the calendar of his life, the years didn't add up for him the same way. It didn't detract from him, but this blank space of time also didn't enrich him as it could have. Without pausing to remember, we become less. It could be that this is only a product of our day and time, of course. Certainly we are obsessed by time and its passage in the ways our ancestors weren't. In the peasant world, most of our predecessors came from, it was only the harvests and the saints that marked out their days. What precise year it was didn't measure their lives very closely. On the other hand, we pay attention to time's passage to the smallest degree. In the covey seven habits process that was so popular among so many people, its participants were encouraged to mark out every bit of their days to be able to leverage the time available to get things done to the fullest possible extent. Every 10-minute interval could be a resource for company potential and personal improvement. And that's just a symbol for our whole culture. Time is everything for us. Not measuring it or have it slip by is a kind of offense for us. The author, Patrick O'Brien, has his character Stephen Madarin saying to Captain Jack Aubrey when Stephen surprised him asleep at his desk one day that no man will acknowledge he was either sleep, he was either asleep or rich. Can it be he's equally ashamed of both? Of course, no man is ashamed of being rich, so denying he was asleep is a special, a special sense of shame, which only highlights how much we obsess about how we use our time and profess to be observant of its utility, which goes to highlight how important it is for us to pause, mark out our days, focus on the calendar, and measure out what we value just so it doesn't slide into forgetfulness. Our emphasis is our tell. If we don't have it, then our time runs away from us. Think

Oklahoma City Bombing And Forgetting

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about our own experience of the Oklahoma City bombing. Every one of us assured each other we would never forget. And yet last year, when the 30th anniversary came around, we were all caught up short, both by the date itself, we had forgotten how easy it was to let April 19th get by us, as well as by how many years had passed so quickly. Our vow about not forgetting was sincere and serious, but slipping into forgetting is what we always do. The memorial site, the museum, the marathon, they're all handholds so that we don't lose our grip on that event. If we didn't have them, the date would come and go after a while and we'd lose any connection with what it meant for us. And we're the ones who were there when it happened. We aren't lost in the generations who've only read about it or seen it only through screens and recordings. It actually took place among us in our telling. That we can forget, that we can let such an event slip past us as it silently leaves the rooms of our memories. It reminds us of how frangible and delicate our capacities to remember really are. We can let almost anything fade into blankness unless we keep it close and mark it out as much as we can. Unless there are dark, full letters on our calendar spaces, we're liable to let it all pass with hardly a mumble. True, when we remember we only hold on to a portion of what took place. Every memory is its own way a selective choice about what to hold on to and what to let go. No one can have known everything about what was happening when it happened. The memory of any event is a combination of the raw experiences and the assembled stories that sorts them out and orders them in a coherent way. All memories are of the story of what happened as much as they are of the events that indeed happened, since all experiences are sifted through the sieve of a story as they happen to us. But this is how they are remembered and in no other way. Memory gives us access to the product of our experience by giving us our part in the story of what takes place. We who were there as it happened relate our participation to the story of it. Those who know only the story can tell their relationship to the story, and those who know only the telling of the story tell about the story. In each level, the event has life and holds on to us, which is why Memorial Day is such a big deal, very much larger than we understand ourselves. It's a peg on which we hang an important aspect of our national history. It's a story in which we come to terms with the conundrums and paradoxes that have made our nation. If you know what it means to remember with effect, the day could hardly be made richer. By memorializing an aspect of the life we share in common as a country and have it linked to the beginning of summer, we've created an opportunity to hitch ourselves to a part of our national identity that risks being lost. It's not an accident we have such a day. It's our chance to remember and to memorialize. We're asked

Civil War Death Toll And Meaning

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to remember the troubled part of our history that resulted in the bloodletting of the Civil War. Now that seems like a dry topic to most people, unless you are the one person in a thousand who enjoys entering into the details of the history and geography of the struggle that defined our existence as a nation and prepared the U.S. to enter the 21st century as the premier power broker on the planet. This war from more than 150 years ago seems ancient. And not just because the cutting edge technologies then were railroads and telegraphs, but because the issues they were fighting about and the questions they were raising have all been settled international lives. It seems foolish for us to worry ourselves much about what went on all those years ago. And besides, the countries changed so much and the concerns of our people have morphed so fully that this event doesn't touch us much. We can easily take the risk of forgetting. In fact, were it not for the arguments over the last couple of years about which statues are appropriate in our communities, most of the facts of the Civil War would be unknown to most of us. We've had to keep some of them fresh in our imagination because the news cycles have made them part and parcel of our thinking. But no matter how remote these memories or how obscure these factoids, they do matter to us, and they matter to our remembering. We do well to invest in Memorial Day as a way to be better informed and better invested in our history. The Civil War was a cataclysm for the whole country. When the guns fired on Fort Sumter and propelled the nation into war, no one knew how long or at what price their war would be fought. As it turned out, it cost more than 700,000 lives in a population of 31.5 million people. That would be roughly like a death toll of seven million in our population today. By contrast, the U.S. death toll in World War II was less than 500,000. It's hard to measure the resources of the country dedicated to war, but suffice it to say that the greatest outlay of the U.S. government for more than a generation after the war was to pay off the war debts. It took more than six decades for the South to claw its way out of the poverty that the war plunged the people into. But more than the cost in lives and property, the war was devastating to the sense of nationhood. The Constitution was always an experiment in self-government. It was never a preordained success story. That the structures it created to channel grievances and to direct energies for the common good couldn't accommodate the concerns of the country so that half of it seceded was a direct slap in the face to the efforts of the Founding Fathers to achieve the dream of a people who could regulate and function successfully. As the cannonballs went flying, they described the arcs of failure across the face of the Constitutional Republic that was the U.S. The war wiped out the first view of what we the people could hope for. And it destroyed our notion of ourselves as brothers to one another. The country was made out as an amalgam of those who were searching for liberty and who were invested in the rule of law. It came together as the product of practicality and function over higher notions of deep loyalties and abstract bodies. If there was one thing that made an American, it was the truth that as a people, things worked for us. And if they didn't work, then we changed them. But this notion broke down as the states couldn't settle their differences, and the rift between alternative opinions of the nation's future broke down. While 1861 was the starting gate for the war between the states, the lead up was decades in the making. Indeed, it went all the way back to the founding of the country. When the differences of opinions formed into regiments and individual towns condensed into battalions, the compact of agreement to form a more perfect union fell apart. What made the country failed. Battle resulted. In fact, horrible, extensive, mind-altering battles chewed up men and resources in ways no one could have imagined. In 1863, after two days of fighting in southern Pennsylvania, 51,000 casualties lay on the fields and in the lanes surrounding a line of hills that no one had noted before, and whose occupation by whom mattered to no one until two days before the battle. In one day at Antietam Creek in Maryland, almost 25,000 men would never see the next sunrise. And on and on throughout the whole history of the war. It was bloodlied in even the jaded eyes of the European observators who accompanied the armies were shocked by. No one at the inception of the war, and certainly no one who bandied about notions of the purifying effects of the battlefield, where arguments might be settled, ever imagined such numbers. Americans did know, but learned quickly, that killing comes easily, especially when the contest is between fragile flesh and flying lead. By the end of the fighting, the dead lay everywhere. President Lincoln entered the guardianship of English oratory by his Gettysburg speech commemorating the dead in the battle fought there. More than his inaugurals and more than his purpose of directions of the meaning of the war, his reminder to everyone of the meaning of the dead has remained at the center of American literature. The dead held everyone's attention. Every city had its own list of those who sacrificed, and every county totted up the price of going to the colors. Throughout the South, the cruel demography of struggle heightened the irony at the heart of wars and battle. The safest situation for a man of military age in the Confederate States during the war was to have been black. Nearly a quarter of all white men in that age bracket became casualties during the war. Black men in the parallel category survived the war mostly intact. War turned all measures upside down and all foundational values into negotiables. The power of the dead extended beyond the grave and touched all measures and apportionments.

How Shared Mourning Rebuilt Union

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When the surrender of the South finally came, putting the country together was the first priority. It was more than sewing up the rift that had resulted. That would have been as easy as reattaching that which had been torn away. But the seceded states had unraveled the Union. There was no agency or action that took them away. They had undone themselves from the whole. It would take something larger than mere reattachment to bring them back into union. Military defeat of secession on the battlefield wasn't enough to create union. It would take a common attachment to something larger than what had divided them. It would take memory. It was not the memory of the one country that had existed before the war. That country had irreconcilable differences that could not be bridged peacefully and fruitfully. Focusing solely on the politics of constitutional construction would not suddenly reconstruct a connection that would hold. Something else was needed, and memory provided the else necessary. Both North and South had to struggle with mourning the losses of the war together, the ghastly toll of the dead that touched every corner of the country and with it had turned every eye toward what a country ought to be. If there had been something worth dying for, then there could be something worth living for. And that something could be accessed by sharing the power of memory together. It didn't come from an established agenda. The memorials springing up around the country after the war were of the Union dead. The victors mourned those who had fallen and reminded everyone of the price of keeping the nation together. But as the celebrations became more poignant, the pressure to celebrate as one country became more pointed. Memorializing the dead helped to unite the country under the banner of common suffering and common tragedy. As each family placed the memory of their dead within the story of suffering and struggle, the story became one of shared experiences and mutual outcomes. The power of memory was able to knit a million tears across the frontier of war and battle into a common story of shared pain and collective honor. Memorial Day became a way to recognize the transformative struggle that brought us a history of as one people and one nation. On this day, we don't just frame the beginning of summer, we notice the perspective for the whole country. To that extent, we can celebrate Memorial Day very well by worrying only about whether we can cook out without getting wet or if the temperature will be moderate enough to enjoy the day outside. The everyday concerns of a free day allow us enough space to memorialize this time as apart from other times. And since we're remembering the gift of being one people and one country, having a day off to celebrate that life is good is an appropriate gift to ourselves. As long as somewhere in our celebration we note that we're remembering that the price for what we have was paid in terms dear and grim, this holiday will have done its work.

Why Civil War Talk Is Dangerous

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In our day and time, we should also add one additional aspect to this weekend. We should remember that the price of civil war is almost unbearable. It rent the country apart and scattered families and futures to the wind. Neither side achieved what it wanted as the war began, and neither the North nor the South were able to bring its best sides to bear on the other. The war was a bloody struggle engaged in by armies and institutions that were blind, deaf, rough, unwieldy, and stupid. For all of the talk about tactics and arms and bravery, both sides went at each other with about as much finesse as amoebas under the microscope. It didn't take long for both sides to lose any sense of proportion and any measure of control. The struggle turned men into brutes and made a mockery of the presumptions of nobility. It was awful in just about every way. Eventually the scale of suffering touched almost everyone everywhere, which shouldn't be forgotten. People in our day and time bandy the concepts of civil war out loud as if it were nothing, as if it were no more than becoming serious about one proposition or another. And when they do, they are as irresponsible as children playing with plutonium. They have no idea what they're handling or any notion of what its potential could be. If there's one takeaway from this year's celebration of this notable weekend, it should be that we have cleared a space on our calendar and made a way in our lives because of the gravity of what we're remembering. We should accept that civil disagreement and profound differences are as nothing compared to the willingness to do battle one against another at any point. Only fools talk of making things in our politics better by war, or of settling our disagreements by exterminating the source of difference. Even our common metaphors thrown around so easily ought to be moderated if we want to respect this day for what it is, a moment carved out by catastrophe. Memorial Day ought to be a day when we pause to remember that the past invites us to step carefully into the future. Back in just a moment. All

Closing Reflection On Passing Seasons

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the world alters and everything changes fast. The season we just entered now hasn't lasted. All reminders of the true life we've entrusted, provided to us laden and burdened and encrusted with all expectations and anticipations of ours that are sown among us and with us flower. But worry not, all anxiety will pass away. It takes no more than one solitary day. The skies will clear and the sun will shine again. Another season will come just round the bend. That's when the weather changes.org.