Honoring the All

As a young girl I grew up with parents who came of age so to speak during World War II. My mom graduated high school in 1945 and four of her brothers served. My father had three brothers who served as well. When I was a kid I never heard anything positive about the women who served this country. All I ever heard was silence from my mother and the most horrible, misogynistic, hateful and degrading comments you could ever want to hear from my father. He knew every horrible doggerel regarding the different branches of service that women were allowed to enter and he repeated them quite frequently. They were sluts and prostitutes and whores. It was demeaning and disheartening for a young girl to hear over and over again. Sadly my dad was not alone in his campaign to demonize these brave women. It was a cultural and societal disgrace. 

Approximately 400,000 women served in different roles in different branches of the military during World War II. 543 died in war related circumstances and 16 died from enemy fire. Several women spent time in both German and Japanese prison camps. I recently watched a show that highlighted the WASPS. The Women Air Force Service Pilots. These women flew planes to air bases and wherever they were needed, when they were needed, so that male pilots could be freed up for combat duty. They often flew them straight off the assembly lines and they had to be able to fly a number of different air craft. During the war 38 of these brave women died serving their country. The woman in the photo above is Gertrude "Tommy" Tompkins. She is the only WASP still unaccounted for and has been missing for almost 75 years now. I was very impressed by these women and very touched by their losses.

A good friend of mine calls me the "keeper of lost souls" and I take my duties to the dead and especially on Memorial Day Weekend I take it very seriously. All the way down in the very depths of my soul I believe that all souls should be respected and honored. No one should be forgotten. All of those lonely stones in the older parts of cemeteries with no one to tend to them makes me very melancholy. I know they are not there and I know the stones are just markers but think about what that says about us as human beings. We live our lives, we touch thousands of other lives by our very existence in the this world, we laugh, we love and eventually we die and we are placed in the ground with a stone to mark the spot and we only continue to live in the memories of those who knew and loved us and one day they will be gone and all that's left is a piece of marble and a name. 

Where I am going with all this rambling you ask? I am not discounting the thousands upon thousands of brave men who died fighting for this country. They should be honored with every fiber of our beings but so too should women like Gertrude Tompkins. She and all female patriots should be honored in death as strongly as they were maligned in life. We should put this right and tell the stories of ALL the brave human beings who have died in service to something greater than themselves. Here's to the men looking to find Gertrude Tompkins. I hope you do so soon and she can be laid to rest with the honor she deserves. So on this Memorial Day let us salute all the souls out there who have passed into our memories but still live in our hearts, both the military and the civilian. Namaste Gertrude. I honor your memory and your sacrifice.