Can You Eat a Hot Dog Patriotically?

Why Memorial Day Is About More Than Either Grief or Grilling

Memorial Day seems to create the same existential crisis every year: are we supposed to be solemnly reflecting on sacrifice or aggressively purchasing patio furniture?

Open social media for five minutes and you’ll see both. One post features a black-and-white photo of a fallen soldier with stirring music and an eagle flying slowly across the screen for reasons no one fully understands. The next is someone double-fisting White Claws on a pontoon boat captioned: Summer starts now, baby.

As Americans, we never quite know what tone we’re supposed to strike.

And honestly? I understand the tension.

As the spouse of an active duty Army officer, Memorial Day is personal for our family in a way that’s hard to fully explain unless you’ve lived inside military life for a long time. Over the last two decades, we’ve known too many people who didn’t come home. Not vague abstractions. Actual friends. West Point classmates. Soldiers whose spouses sat beside me at unit events and school programs and dining-outs before their lives split cleanly into a before and after.

One of the most meaningful things Drew took with him during his space mission was a chain of dog tags from soldiers killed in action from one of his old units. When I saw the video of those tags floating weightless in space, slowly drifting around each other in silence, it knocked the breath out of me. The number alone was staggering. But so was the reminder that every tag represented a family whose entire world had been permanently rearranged.

Military life teaches you to live with a strange tension: overwhelming relief and devastating grief often exist side by side.

I remember deployments where communication suddenly went dark and every military spouse immediately started mentally spiraling. You try to stay rational. You fail spectacularly. You refresh your phone approximately 700 times while pretending to function like a normal person. And when communication finally resumes and you hear your spouse’s voice, the relief is physical.

But almost immediately comes the sobering realization that somewhere, another family may not get that call. 

That weight matters. We should feel it. Not to wallow in sadness once a year like emotional method actors, but because remembrance is part of what keeps sacrifice from becoming abstract.

But here’s the thing I’ve come to believe after years inside this community:

I don’t think the men and women we honor on Memorial Day gave their lives so Americans could sit silently in darkened homes feeling guilty over potato salad.

I think they would want you to gather people you love.

I think they would want kids doing cannonballs into pools while someone burns the hot dogs because they got distracted arguing about college football. I think they would want music playing and burgers on the grill and neighbors lingering in folding chairs long after sunset getting eaten alive by mosquitoes because no one remembered to bring the bug spray again.

That’s the whole point.

The freedoms we enjoy on ordinary weekends were purchased at an extraordinary cost.

So yes — enjoy the day.

But at some point, pause.

Turn the music down for a minute.

Teach your kids why the holiday exists. Say the names of people who served. Pray for Gold Star families, for whom every single day is Memorial Day. Reach out to a veteran. Send a text. Make a call. Raise a glass in quiet gratitude for people who carried burdens most of us will never fully understand.

Then turn the music back up.

Throw more brats on the grill. Eat dessert. Let the kids stay in the pool too long.

Receive the gift they gave.

That, it seems to me, is one of the most meaningful ways to honor them.