Memorial Day 2026: Remembering Those Who Gave Everything

As the school year draws to a close and students head into summer, I find myself thinking about what we carry with us when we leave campus ... not just the knowledge we’ve accumulated, but the values we’ve chosen to live by. Memorial Day, which falls this Monday, May 25, offers all of us a powerful opportunity to pause, reflect, and remember.

I want to share some thoughts with our CA community about what this day truly means, because I believe understanding it deeply is part of becoming the kind of thoughtful, grateful, and engaged citizens we are called to be.

Memorial Day is not Veterans Day

This is one of the most important distinctions to understand. Last November, we honored Veterans Day, a day to thank all who have served in our military, including the millions who returned home and live among us as neighbors, parents, teachers, and friends. Memorial Day is different in a specific and profound way.

Memorial Day is a day of mourning and of gratitude for those who did not come home.

It began after the Civil War, when communities across a grieving nation started decorating the graves of fallen soldiers in a ritual that was then called Decoration Day. On May 30, 1868, General John Logan designated it a national observance to honor Union soldiers who had died in battle. In the decades that followed, communities in the South began similarly honoring their Confederate dead. Gradually, the tradition expanded to honor all American military personnel who died in service to their country, across every war and every conflict. In 1971, Congress established the last Monday in May as the official federal holiday we observe today.

More than 1.3 million Americans have died in military service throughout our nation’s history,  each one of whom was a person with a name, a family, and a future they would never get to live.

Why should this matter to you?

I know some of you might be tempted to think of this as a distant history lesson in wars that happened long before you were born, in places that feel abstract on a map. Let me push back on that gently.

Many of those who died in service were teenagers or young adults—just 18, 19, 20 years old. They were the age of our Upper School students when they deployed. They had families who loved them, friends who counted on them, and futures they were beginning to imagine. They made the decision, or answered the call, to place themselves between harm and the people they cared about.

The weight of sacrifice

At Arlington National Cemetery outside Washington, D.C., there are more than 400,000 graves. Row upon row of white marble headstones, each one marking a life, a story, a sacrifice. On Memorial Day weekend, volunteers place a small American flag at every single grave. This gesture is duplicated at U.S. military cemeteries across the globe, and it is one of the most quietly powerful images this country produces each year.

In communities across Colorado, families still carry the weight of loss from wars in Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan, and others. The grief is not historical. It is present. It is alive in the lives of parents, siblings, and children who mark this day not with barbecues, but with flowers and tears.

Part of what it means to be educated is to be able to hold the complexity of your own good fortune alongside an awareness of the cost at which it was secured.

What we can do

Take a moment of genuine silence. At 3:00 p.m. on Memorial Day, the National Moment of Remembrance asks all Americans to pause for one minute. It is a small and meaningful thing to do. Set a reminder. Stop what you’re doing. Think about what the day is actually for.

Learn a name. The National Memorial in Washington and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall list the names of the fallen. Look one up. Read a biography. Find a story. Turning a statistic into a person is one of the most important things education can do.

Ask someone in your family about their connections to service. You may be surprised by what you find. Many families carry stories of service that go unspoken. This weekend is a good time to ask.

Hold space for nuance. You can question the wisdom of particular wars, as many historians, veterans, and citizens do, while still honoring the humanity and sacrifice of those who served and died. Honoring the fallen is not the same as endorsing every military decision ever made. Both things can be true at once.

Live with gratitude. Not performative gratitude, but genuine appreciation for the freedoms that shape your daily life. 

Memorial Day is the kind of holiday that can pass in a blur of travel, cookouts, and the welcome relief of summer’s beginning. I hope you’ll let it be something more than that this year.

At Colorado Academy, we talk often about living with purpose, contributing to something larger than ourselves, and thinking deeply about the world we inhabit. Memorial Day is an invitation to do exactly that.

Wishing our entire CA community a meaningful Memorial Day weekend.