Memorials for Lincoln, soldiers, my brother tell us what we had

Trekking to the Lincoln Memorial on the first sticky, steamy night of our family vacation in Washington, D.C., we soak up the emotion and power of this special monument. Staring up at the marble statue of this senator from Illinois who became one of our greatest presidents, you see the man emerge from the myth. Lincoln looks imposing yet tired, strong yet weary, legendary yet lonely.

We stand on the same spot on the stairs where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech, where protesters during the Vietnam War made their voices heard and where millions of Americans and visitors come every year to be a part of that history. We are humbled. This impressive tribute to Lincoln, who is buried in Springfield and died 57 years before the Lincoln Memorial became part of our national landscape, is meant not for the dead president and our past, but for us and our hopes for the future.

Whether we seek out Lincoln or just happen to notice a Capitol lobby statue of Illinois native and longtime Idaho Sen. William E. Borah, these reminders of the past connect all of us present tourists to the National Mall and Memorial Parks in our nation’s capital. We all take the same photographs standing beneath the statue of our third president in the Thomas Jefferson Memorial or pretending to hold up the Washington Monument.

We meander through the 7.5-acre Franklin Delano Roosevelt Monument, stopping to cool off in the mist of the waterfalls and appreciate the statue of the president in his wheelchair, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and the poor souls forever captured in a Great Depression bread line beneath an FDR quotation that still packs power by concluding, “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”

We touch the names of those who gave their lives and are remembered forever in the reflective stone walls of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. We stand before the Korean War Veterans Memorial’s ghostly, larger-than-life, stainless steel figures in full combat gear and on the move. In the hot sun illuminating the World War II Memorial, we remember my late father, Wilson Constable, and sit next to the word Tinian, the island where his B-29 departed for the bombing of Tokyo and the 25 missions that earned him a Distinguished Flying Cross.

We walk the sacred grounds of Arlington National Cemetery and visit the former home of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, which overlooks the sea of white gravestones that fill his former plantation. We talk about lives lost and the contributions to our nation as we visit the eternal flame above President John F. Kennedy’s grave or the simple crosses marking the final resting places for his brothers, Robert and Ted. We grow silent to hear the clicking of the heels of a Third U.S. Infantry sentinel and the white-gloves inspection of the M-14 rifle at the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknowns.

We seek out the memorials for crews of the Space Shuttle Challenger and Columbia, and we pay our respects before the graves of people such as boxer Joe Louis, Supreme Court justices Thurgood Marshall, Oliver Wendell Holmes, William H. Rehnquist and Warren E. Burger, presidential son Robert Todd Lincoln and countless soldiers, including civil rights activist Medgar Evers, who was murdered in 1963. Visitors place stones around the base and on top of Evers’ white stone, making it stand out from the others.

I am reminded of that at the end of my family’s vacation, when we return to my Hoosier homestead for our annual pilgrimage to Fountain Park Chautauqua. My mom, two sisters, loved ones and our children gather at the old cemetery in Goodland, Ind., to see the new stone bench monument in honor of my brother, Bill, who died at age 48 one year ago today, a little more than nine months after being diagnosed with bile-duct cancer. The Fritz family, losers for the first time in years in our annual Fountain Park euchre match between the two families, leave a pair of jacks (the highest cards in euchre) in front of Bill’s stone and two more jacks in front of my dad’s grave, making us all smile.

After a week of visiting grand monuments boasting statues, an eternal flame and glowing tributes, I am most moved by the chance to sit on a simple bench under an ash tree next to a cow pasture. Reminders of those we’ve lost, all these monuments end up making us grateful for what we have been given.