A day to remember, honor vets' sacrifices

For the seventh year, the Ridges Cemetery Committee held its annual Memorial Day ceremony Monday honoring the memory of soldiers buried in the three cemeteries around the ridges.
Committee Chair Tom Walker said at the ceremony that the committee has been working since 2000 to refurbish and beautify the cemeteries and, in doing so, "restore dignity to the deceased and fight stigma against their living counterparts."

Since 2005, the committee has held a Memorial Day celebration at the cemeteries as well, laying wreaths on soldiers' graves, holding a gun salute and having a choir perform as well as having a eulogy read. The cemeteries contain the remains of former patients of the old Athens Asylum (and later Mental Health Center).

"One of the main purposes is to restore humanity to those forgotten dead," Walker said.

The number of veterans buried at the three Ridges cemeteries is up to 85 currently identified according to research, Walker said.

Participants in the event included the OU ROTC Color Guard presenting and retiring the flag, Civil War re-enactors doing a 21-gun salute, and the Hocking Valley Chorus singing a variety of songs. Cemeteries project enthusiast, the late Harold Forrest, was also honored during the ceremony. Caroline Cade performed taps.

Afghan and Iraq war veteran Sgt. Eric Burke of the Ohio University Veterans Association gave the eulogy, where he read from a Memorial Day speech by Oliver Wendell Holmes, a veteran of the Civil War and later a U.S. Supreme Court associate justice.

"In the full tide of spring, at the height of the symphony of flowers and love and life there comes a pause, and through the silence we hear the lonely pipe of death," Burke read. "Year after year lovers wandering under the apple trees and through the clover and deep grass are surprised with sudden tears as they see black veiled figures stealing through the morning to a soldier's grave. Year after year the comrades of the dead follow, with public honor, procession and commemorative flags and funeral march honor and grief from us who stand almost alone, and have seen the best and noblest of our generation pass away.

"But grief is not the end of all. I seem to hear the funeral march become a paean. I see beyond the forest the moving banners of a hidden column. Our dead brothers still live for us, and bid us think of life, not death of life to which in their youth they lent the passion and joy of the spring. As I listen, the great chorus of life and joy begins again, and amid the awful orchestra of seen and unseen powers and destinies of good and evil our trumpets sound once more a note of daring, hope and will."