Memorial Day is different this year--as we remember the Veterans, 3 cemeteries come to mind. This is the American Cemetery in the Ardennes, where my Dad was deployed in WW2 (Battle of the Bulge):

He survived and had a good life into his 90's, but many of his fellow soldiers didn't make it back. The shadow of that experience affected our family, although we rarely talked explicitly about it till we had the chance to go back to a medical conference in the 1990s.

The brutality of that experience came through as did the meaning of sacrificing your personal well being for the benefit of others, creating a future for USA and much of the rest of the world. My Dad had a good life and was buried in this cemetery:

Woodland Cemetery is just outside of the Clemson football stadium, known as "Death Valley". Both parents were laid to rest there--a much more peaceful & family oriented place compared with the beautiful but stark mass graves in the Ardennes.

Today we are in the Presidio in San Francisco. Just over the hill from our apartment is the San Francisco National Cemetery, within sight of the Golden Gate Bridge:

Although we don't know anyone buried there, on a "normal" Memorial Day, Lydia would be at ceremony with flowers laid at the graves. Today, the event is virtual as we fight a different enemy with different weapons. It has killed more Americans than any of our post-WW2 wars.

While biomedical scientists develops antivirals, antibodies and vaccines, health care workers face risk to care for others and front line service workers work at risk, a big determinant of how we fare in this battle will be the degree to which social distancing is maintained.

As we remember the sacrifice of Veterans in war, I hope all of us can hold the line in the battle agains SARS CoV-2, sacrificing our personal freedoms to reduce the spread of this disease as these medical countermeasures are developed.