Lest We Forget
My wife Carmela and I enjoy wandering through old cemeteries. I don’t mean the urban plaque-in-the ground cemeteries designed for easy mowing and upkeep of the grounds. What fascinates us are the old-fashioned cemeteries with tombstones and the stories those tombstones tell. Some are grand – for the “important and affluent” members of the community, and some are smaller, for those deemed less important – often the wives and children of the important and affluent, and sometimes the black sheep kin, who failed to measure up to expectations.
On a recent trip through the south – looking for a secluded place to do our daily exercises – we pulled off on a dirt road and found a deserted cemetery in Arkansas. It was the kind of cemetery we like with upright stones that tell a story about the people whose remains lay beneath the sod.
In the middle of the cemetery was a monument.
The big stone said:
IN MEMORY OF WILLIAM FIELDEN YOEMAN 2D. CLASS USN
SON OF ERNEST C. AND
NONA B. CAMM
BORN AT HAZEN, ARKANSAS
JULY 30 1921
GAVE HIS LIFE IN THE SERVICE OF HIS
COUNTRY AND IN PERFORMANCE OF
HIS DUTY ABOARD THE U.S.S. ARIZONA
AT PEARL HARBOR, DECEMBER 7, 1941
To the left of Young William’s large stone, was a smaller stone for his father Ernest, who died in 1991, and to the right of William, lies his mother, who died in 1989. They lived five decades past the death of their son. Five decades that they mourned him and the loss of the life they could have shared with him, and the grandchildren and great grandchildren they might have had.
Their years of pain and anguish seemed as cold and hard as the tombstone they erected.
We recently celebrated 250 years of this country with all the pomp and circumstance and goodwill we could have hoped for. Those 250 years were built on the blood and courage of millions of Americans like William Fielden. And on the sorrow of his mother and father who didn’t get to see their son come home and have a future.
It’s a small-town tale in a small-town world. Carmela rubbed her hand over the stone.
We finished our exercises, took one last look, and hit the road.
– George Lee Cunningham
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