Memorial Day this Monday; Walt Whitman on remembering the dead and suffering …

Whitman was a volunteer nurse during the Civil War.

A short excerpt below the link.

How and Why We Remember the Dead: A Memorial Day Lesson from Walt Whitman

Whitman particularly felt the urgent need to recall the soldiers who suffered and died in the military hospitals, which he called “the Untold and Unwritten History of the War.” Some of the men killed on the battlefield might be remembered in military histories, but the men who died in hospitals from dysentery, infection, and fatal but long-lingering wounds might forever remain anonymous.

In a letter to his mother in 1864, Whitman describes firsthand a heartbreaking example of this kind of personal erasure. While volunteering at the local war hospital, he had witnessed the death of a newly arrived soldier:

they took him into the ward, & the doctor came immediately, but it was all of no use—the worst of it is too that he is entirely unknown—there was nothing on his clothes, or any one with him, to identify him—& he is altogether unknown—Mother, it is enough to rack one’s heart, such things—very likely his folks will never know in the world what has become of him—poor poor child, for he appeared as though he could be but 18….

Apart from a doctor’s brief medical notes—if indeed there were any—Whitman’s letter may very well be the only record in existence of the passing of that young man.