A Contemplative Place of Mind

I spent a few hours last week re-centering myself. As the violent swirling mess that is the Trump White House continued to dominate the news cycles, and as Trump himself hammered away monosyllabically about the crooked and fake media, I threw myself into photography, my old profession and now an avocation consisting mainly of taking pictures of birds. But last week, I put the birds on hold and took up the cameras to pay homage to man and his family.

A few months ago, Julie, a dear friend, asked me to photograph the ceremony surrounding the interment of her husband, Air Force Colonel Owen Wormser, an American hero, at Arlington National Cemetery. To be asked was an honor, and to be there was to share in a tradition as old as the Republic.

I wish I had known Owen better, though over the past five years we had become friends who could josh each other in social media posts, and share family pictures of our children and dogs. To see him in the full spectrum of his life, you had to picture him in the cockpit of a fighter in combat over Vietnam and, at the same time, watch him play with his Portuguese Water Dogs Yagi and Sasha on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay. Yin and Yang. An American warrior and a kind-hearted softie. He loved his community; he gave much to it. He loved his country; he stood firm on his principles to defend it. He loved his family; he gave all of himself to them. The best kind of hero. Such men and women are the strongest threads in the weave of our nation’s flag. 

Six black horses pulled the caisson bearing Owen’s stars-and-stripes-wrapped casket, clopping softly to the gravesite as several dozen family members and friends walked behind. Around us as we made our way up the hill were the ghosts of some of the more than 400,000 men and women whose service to country earned them, and their spouses, their allotted spaces in this beautiful cemetery. The light of the late winter sun brightened the granite-stitched hills, and cast grey-blue shadows into the cemetery’s hollows.   

The horses came to a halt on a gentle slope overlooking the graceful spires of the Air Force Memorial to the South, the Tomb of the Unknown to the West, and the Washington Monument across the Potomac to the East. Just down the hill from the gravesite was the cemetery’s columbarium, where my parents’ ashes are inurned. Like Owen, my father was a fighter pilot, and I’m sure the spirits of both men were enjoying the blue sky and sun-split clouds that arched over the cemetery.

The wind was a force to be reckoned with this day, and the airmen of the honor guard braced themselves to keep the American flag taut above the casket while the chaplain spoke kindly of the husband, father, grandfather, and patriot being laid to rest. The melancholy notes from a bagpipe strained to be heard above the gusts of wind, 21 rifle shots split the air, and Taps echoed across the cemetery.

The honor guard fought the stiff breeze as they prepared the flag, fold-over-fold, shaping it into a tri-cornered tribute of white stars on a blue field. An Air Force officer received the flag, turned, kneeled in front of Julie, and, with a few softly-spoken words of thanks from a grateful nation, passed Owen’s flag to her. 

Julie held the folded flag on her lap, her red-gloved hands caressing the stars. Next to her, a young girl who had cried inconsolably on the walk to the gravesite, sat quietly, taking in the final moments of the granddad she’d loved all her life. One of my photographs takes in the farewell tableau, family, friends, and honor guard gathered around the casket, shaded by an awning, while the sun, at the top of the picture, casts bright beams down upon the mourners.

This scene, with many variations, is repeated nearly 30 times a day, every day…almost 7,000 interments or inurnments at Arlington every year. But if you ask any family who has ever laid to rest a loved one at Arlington, they will tell you that the services performed by the honor guards, bands, buglers, and chaplains, were unique, unhurried, sensitive, and gracious. And so it was for Owen.

After the service, I took a long walk across the hallowed grounds. Just me and the spirits of the thousands of men and women who promised the ultimate sacrifice to defend our country against all enemies, foreign and domestic. From time to time I stopped to examine a headstone of a nineteen-year-old, or the headstones of a husband or wife or mother or father.

I visited the columbarium where my father's and mother's ashes are inurned. As I always do during my visits to see them, I touched their niche’s marble cover with its engraved names and birth and death years. Each time I do this, I want to make them come alive again, if just to whisper to me words of advice and comfort as my own calendar seems to accelerate, the pages turning over faster and faster, and time refuses to pause.

On these visits, I speak to my father, wishing him well, thanking him for raising a son who is trying hard to live up to his example. There is a small stone bench in front of their wall, and I sit down and remember them as they were at the top of their game, and I try hard not to recall the miseries of their final days. Death can be a blessing at such times…but it is still a loss for those left behind.

At this time of year, the cemetery gates close at five, and I realized I had less than an hour for a walk. I stood up, patted my parents’ niche one more time, and walked out of the columbarium to face the sacred fields and hills of the cemetery.

In front of me stretched the flat field of Section 60 where lie the soldiers of our most recent wars. In the distance stood the deep red sandstone and brick archway of the McClellan Gate, limned in the low sunlight. And beyond the gate, leading to the crest of the hill above the Tomb of the Unknown, the even formations of headstones rise and fall with the contours of the gentle knolls and soft valleys of eternal rest where my wife's parents are buried amidst a grove of trees not far from the Kennedy grave-site.

The setting sun illuminated so many of them—the young, the old, the pilots, the sailors, the grunts, the jarheads, the red tails, the tankers, the submariners, the cooks, the clerks, the doctors and nurses, the leaders and their troops, parents, sons, daughters, and husbands and wives—with a light so intense and warm that it refilled me with such pride for being a small part of a much greater whole.

I do love this country, and I love all who have given so much to make my walk in the cemetery such a powerful reaffirmation of our founding values. Feel free to disagree, but before you do, take the same walk.

If you are fortunate to live in the Washington, D.C., area, you have a place to go that will encourage you to put away most of your worries for a few hours. It is Arlington National Cemetery, a sacred place, profound, achingly beautiful, and unapologetically American. If you don’t live here, but your travels get you close, it is a necessary diversion from your route.