Despite the activities of life that mark Memorial Day – the picnics and parades, the barbecues and backyard bashes – the holiday has always been about death. It unofficially began in Waterloo, N.Y., in 1866 when townspeople gathered to honor their Civil War dead. They decorated graves together. They mourned the loss of young lives.

Memorial Day calls out for visits to cemeteries where veterans rest forever together. In the graves of those who died in war, visitors see the unchanging human cost despite the changing wars. The 20-year-old who died of bayonet wounds in the Civil War lost out on continued adult life in the same way as the 20-year-old who stepped on the land mine in Vietnam – or wandered too near an IED in Fallujah. Cemeteries tell the stories we sometimes would like to forget. But to forget is to dishonor. And Memorial Day has also been a holiday about honor.

For more than a decade, dedicated men and women have fought for a cemetery for Eastern Washington veterans. A place where veterans will be buried, free of charge, and where their final resting places will be maintained into perpetuity.

This year, WashingtonLegislature passed a bill creating the Eastern Washington Veterans Cemetery. Gov. Chris Gregoire signed the bill into law. The timing was right, because the war in Iraq has allowed citizens to better understand why they must provide services from the beginning of a person’s military commitment to the end.

“On Veterans Day 2008, we will do the groundbreaking,” said John Lee, director of the Washington State Department of Veterans Affairs. “A year later, on Veterans Day 2009, we will have the first interments of veterans.”

The site for the cemetery was just selected, Lee said. It will be built on 80 acres north of West Medical Lake off West Espanola Road on land now owned by the Department of Natural Resources. Those involved are working out complicated water rights in an area challenged by water availability, but Lee said, “Everyone is optimistic about (the site.) Everyone wants to do this.”

Those eligible to be buried at the cemetery include war and peace-time veterans and their spouses, from any branch of the service, from any location in the country, though most of those buried will likely come from Eastern Washington and North Idaho. Ultimate cemetery capacity is unknown, because no one can predict how many people in the future will choose cremation over burial.

Federal money will pay for the design and construction of the cemetery. State money will keep it going year after year. Individuals can support it by buying special Armed Forces license plates. But the best support will come through visiting the cemetery.

The inclination to remember veterans on a special day in May has lasted now 141 years, since that first gathering in Waterloo, N.Y. With Eastern Washington’s newest cemetery, the important message of Memorial Day will be easy to find among the gravestones of those who served their country.