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VE Day and the End of Memory
We still leave flowers, but for how much longer?
Flowers float on the waves.
Three red roses, blood red petals visible to primate eyes that evolved to spot ripe redness against ubiquitous jungle green.
We still leave flowers. Flowers and candles on the step of the church in Prague where the killers of Reinhard Heydrich made their last stand. Flowers in prehistoric tombs in Wales, so old now they’ll never get any older. Faded flowers choked with roadside smut, plastic wrappers turned brittle by endless Mediterranean sun, marking the place where someone’s son slipped and fell off the beam of the world.
Today, these flowers might be for those who have been dead far longer than they were ever alive.
May 8 is a holiday in France. I forgot until I went to the beach and saw it packed with families splashing around in the unusually strong waves. It’s VE Day, the 80th anniversary of Germany’s unconditional surrender during World War II.
Every generation has its sorrows, its suffering, the too-human fear of the collapse of all things. It was the bad luck of my grandparents’ generation to stare down a real threat. To watch the flames glow in their hometown, to hear the bumblebee drone of bombers overhead. To know that death was coming, and to know…
