Part of my job is doing all the plant care in local cemeteries. I try to learn about the people I work around to build a sense of social utility in the work. Today’s theme was “What did this person do in WW2?”. Most of them had support roles or basic infantry assignments. When I googled one name though, he was smiling in front of a plane decorated in 10+ swastika trophies. He shot down a V1 rocket.
The next time I go back there it’ll be with flowers.
I wish we had good memorials. All of them are veteran slop with high standards for bad landscaping. We tend them to avoid complaints more than we do because there’s some felt human experience to it. The graves and cremain mausoleums are the closest thing locally to a site I tread carefully around, and there’s something uniquely humbling to that kind of memorial work that isn’t in most urban greenspace.