Wrestling With My Confederate Past
I recently read an article in the New York Times Magazine about an organization in Germany that works to find and preserve the graves of fallen German soldiers. One of the observations that was made was that we think of those who have died as "single people" -- especially when thinking of our own family members We do not think of them as part of a group of humans bent on a shared objective. The grave marks a grandparent or a great uncle -- not a Nazi. And so the question emerges: "How to remember this person?" How to mark their graves -- and how to mark their memory. I spend a lot of time in cemeteries and see the variety of ways that people are remembered, the meaning of their lives etched in stone. "Gone but not forgotten / We will love you forever," and "Best Mom / Gone but not forgotten," read a pair of headstones in DeHart Cemetery. I love this cemetery; many of my family are buried here and I visit to photograph the headstones and t...
