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A Prayer For The Living

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By MARY CATHERINE COOLIDGE Special to the Tribune

The Tampa Tribune

Published: May 26, 2008

It's Memorial Day, and I don't have anyone to remember. No one close to me has died in the service of our country.

I don't even personally know anyone who is currently being paid to protect, fight and possibly die for our country. I guess I'm one of the lucky ones - not to have a friend, or husband or neighbor fighting in wartime.

But I've known plenty of courageous civilians. Men, mostly, whose everyday swagger hints at the underlying courage that must expand to heroic levels in places like Iraq.

While I can't speak for women's courage as easily as I can of men's, it's only because men have so often protected me - not in any death-defying ways, but in those everyday ways that men do.

They've walked between me and the street. They've captured spiders and put them outside because I couldn't bear them to see them squished. They've told me, "You stay here" while they trudge out to the backyard to check out the "strange noise" I insist I heard.

And they've occasionally put themselves in dicey situations to defend me:

My oldest brother, maybe 12 at the time, facing down a bunch of neighborhood bullies who had been throwing snowballs at me on my way home from school.

My first boyfriend finding me crying in my apartment, and going back out to confront a bunch of half-drunk college boys who had yelled obscenities at me when I rode my bike past their frat house.

Years later, another man - one I'd been dating only a short while - waited for me on one of the most dangerous streets in Boston, while I was inside a brick building tutoring young street toughs toward their GEDs.

I'd told him I was busy that night, volunteering in Roxbury; we weren't supposed to see each other until the weekend. But when I came out from the building around 9:15 p.m., after the class was over, there he was - waiting for me, smoking a cigarette as casually as if he was waiting for me outside my apartment on Beacon Hill.

I'm not sure how long he was standing out there in the February cold that night, but his being there meant I didn't have to make that lonely walk to a nearly empty subway platform and stand there waiting for a train by myself.

I don't have a clue about what it would feel like to lose safety and freedom in my life because so many American men have made sure that I never had to forfeit either.

It's an exquisite luxury of being female. An exquisite luxury of being American.

These are the same kinds of men, and women, too, I imagine we have in Iraq and Afghanistan.

They're the soldiers sending letters or emails home, saying "I'm fine, honey, don't worry." Saying, "Thanks for the cookies, Mom. Thanks for the pictures. I'll be home in August."

They're the soldiers holding their buddy's head together, waiting for the medic, ignoring the blood spilling through their fingers, murmuring, "Hang on. You're OK. Just hang on."

They're the soldiers putting themselves in harm's way to protect each other and this country - and people like me, when you get right down to it.

This weekend, I'm thinking of them. Those men and women still soldiering on in the face of fear. Those soldiers who, in their lives before the wars called them to far-off places, were probably all still doing the same thing stateside that they're doing across the world - making those they love feel as safe and sound as possible in a world that we know, for sure, is neither.

This weekend, I'm thinking of them. The soldiers still alive.

I'm praying they never have to be remembered on any Memorial Day.

Mary Catherine Coolidge is a freelance writer living in Sarasota.

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