When I was a preschooler, Memorial Day started with interminable journeys to cemeteries scattered across the Twin Cities, laying wreaths on graves of relatives I had never known. I had known none of my grandparents, nor the baby brother dead almost a generation before, nor most of the other relatives where we stopped, laid wreaths, said the Lord’s Prayer.

When this somber pilgrimage was finished, we went home, grilled hamburgers and hot dogs, often joined by my godparents and their brood.

When I got to grade school, I discovered Memorial Day was meant to honor the dead from our wars, not just dead relatives, though time has mingled the two. 

Memorial Day is a day to honor those who are now gone forever, a holiday that swirls into the same mix: the somber and the joyful, remembrance and relaxation, the unofficial beginning of summer while contemplating the endings marking our lives.

It is a holiday birthed from the carnage of the Civil War, a war possibly costing as many lives as all our other wars combined. A scarred, traumatized country, shakily recombined, searched for a way to honor the dead, help those left behind nurse the holes in lives left by those never coming back. The holiday was called Decoration Day.

In 2026, it feels we might still be fighting the Civil War, two sets of principles warring. One demanding submission, the other requiring liberation. A North versus South of the mind. 

The Civil War wound in this country is complex, a war holding a fierce grip on the country, never left behind, never fully resolved. 

On a quiet night after Edgartown Books had closed, I wandered the store, thinking what books I should mention in this piece.

The Island’s own Tony Horwitz spent much of his life surveying the ongoing complexity of the Civil War. His amazing book “Confederates in the Attic” explores why the Civil War demands so much of our national imagination. Civil War re-enactors on both sides go to extremes to be authentic, crash-dieting to be starving Confederate soldiers, Union re-enactors eating worm-infested tack. We are obsessed with the Civil War, which gave birth to this holiday.

And on Memorial Day 2019, Tony Horwitz died, suddenly, while promoting his latest, sadly last, book, “Spying on the South.” 

“Memorial Days,” by his wife Geraldine Brooks, chronicles her processing his passing, the enormous task of dealing with the details of death, while having no real process in our culture to deal with grief. Brooks retreated eventually to a desolate island off Australia, and gave herself the gift of grieving.

I read the book in one sitting, an amazing chronicle of grief and life.

Another memoir of grieving is Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking,” chronicling the year following the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, also a famous writer, of a sudden heart attack while dining with her.

Greg Harrigan was a year ahead of me in high school. He teased me one day; saw it hurt, became a friend. I stood at his graveside after his death in Vietnam, have touched his name on the Vietnam Memorial, a hole in my heart because he is not here.

To understand the war in Vietnam, a conflict which divided the country, read Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried.” It celebrates, in a very human way, all those who fought that war. Or the recently deceased Philip Caputo’s “A Rumor of War,” a searing account of his time in Vietnam.

Since 9/11, we are living in a time some call “the Forever War.” Our country has been engaged in conflict for a quarter-century — Afghanistan, Iraq, military excursions in Africa, now Iran. 

David Finkel’s books “The Good Soldiers” and “Thank You for Your Service” are heart-wrenching tales from the Iraq War period, not about just the dead but the living who returned — also what Memorial Day should be about, I think: those who survived but are wounded by what happened, what they’ve seen, hurts searing souls, driving them to drink, suicide, drugs, broken marriages. The returning victims of war, hoping to salve the wounds no one sees but which are so very real. 

On this Memorial Day and on all Memorial Days, there is so much to be remembered, so much to celebrate, so much to mourn.

Mathew Tombers is the manager of Edgartown Books.