Memorial Day is Complicated—That’s the Point

Coming home from Afghanistan

On Memorial Day, 2013, I returned home from nine months in a dusty, remote, and barren corner of Afghanistan. So remote, our food resupply needed to be airdropped at night by low-flying cargo planes. So austere, we had no running water. So dangerous, we found improvised explosives intended to blow us up nearly every time we left our isolated outpost. 

And yet, there was beauty. Each night, standing guard atop the earthen walls, the Milky Way lit up the sky, making it easy to forget, if only for a moment, the war all around us.

Life was not easy or simple on deployment, but it felt purposeful. We lost multiple friends and teammates: Matt Kantor, Kevin Ebbert, and Job Price. We nearly lost even more, yet we believed in what we were doing. It was complicated.

The sacred task of remembering

Memorial Day is the national holiday where Americans remember those who died in service to our country. But for many Veterans, it’s far more than a moment of patriotism. It is a day of so many deeply human feelings. As a Veteran, some words that come to mind for me are: pride, honor, respect, and at the same time, frustration, grief, and longing. 

War leaves its mark—not just on the body, but on the heart and mind.

Having experienced war and lost friends myself, it’s just not that simple. In many ways, remembering those who have fallen has taught me how to embrace my own humanness. The same humanness that connects us all. Those nine months shaped me in ways that my 25-year-old self did not fully comprehend. In some ways, it incurred hidden scars. In other ways, it gifted me a much richer life perspective. 

My journey toward healing and mental health

It took five years before I began to uncover those gifts. In late 2018, I sat on a forest-green couch at Naval Base Coronado’s Chapel, nervously waiting for my first therapy session. My first-ever therapist, Jackie, asked a simple question: “What brings you here today?”

I didn’t know how to answer.

I had no words for what I felt. Part of me wanted to cry. More of me wanted to scream. Most of me just wanted to walk out.

But I stayed.

Seven years and countless therapy sessions later, I am incredibly grateful for that decision. Jackie—who I now refer to as “the woman who saved my life”—helped me navigate the complexities of PTSD, grief, and self-trust through therapeutic tools like CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) and EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing).

Sometimes we met twice a week, other times twice a month. She first helped me learn the language of emotions and authentically put words to what I felt. Then she taught me how to both name and validate my emotions. How to see them like sunsets—always changing, sometimes beautiful, sometimes not, but never permanent. 

By appreciating these shifts I could learn to much more deeply trust myself. Her support worked wonders for me, and my life has absolutely been on a different trajectory for it. I’m a believer that the right therapist armed with the appropriate clinical tools can reshape our lives in ways many of us, including me, often underestimate. 

One of the most powerful lessons she helped me learn was this:

One of the best ways to honor the fallen is to embrace the life we have and use it to make the world better.

This can sound trite. But taken to its core, I find it deeply inspiring. To me, it is intertwined with Memorial Day. I think if given a chance, my fallen teammates like Matt Kantor, Kevin Ebberet and Job Price might whisper this in our ears when we feel a bit lost. 

Purpose, service, and the path forward

For me, this lesson of embracing my life is deeply connected to the idea that I’m only human. That I don’t have it all figured out. That I can have conflicting emotions. And that sometimes I just don’t know what to do. Letting these notions sink in has taken time, yet has opened me up to far more connecting relationships, inspiring work, and meaning into where I want to take my life. For me, it took war and loss to learn them, but I think they’re all something that we can stand to be reminded of.

Reflecting on Memorial Day

Over the years, I’ve learned to seek out more of these whispers. To me, that can be one of the most meaningful ways to memorialize our fallen warriors. I visit Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery in San Diego from time to time, always alone and usually on foggy Sunday mornings. It’s the final resting place of more than 120,000 Veterans. 

I feel a quiet familiarity along these rolling hills perched atop the rugged ocean bluffs. I often will ask them for advice—the countless Veterans whose tombstones I am walking amongst. I trust them to answer, and they always do. The answer isn’t always what I want to hear, but it is what I need to hear. Usually they remind me to take the harder path, the one less traveled. They were the inspiration for me to run our work with the VA at SonderMind. They told me I needed to take care of our fellow brother and sister Veterans, they needed it, and I was the one meant to do it. 

This Memorial Day, I invite you to ask yourself: What might our fallen say to you if they could speak today?

Maybe you have a Veteran in your family, a mentor, a friend who served, or someone you once met who left an impact. These courageous men and women may be gone, but their legacy doesn’t have to fade.

Their whispers are still here—guiding us, inspiring us, reminding us to live well and serve others.

Memorial Day isn’t just a day of reflection. It’s a reminder to live fully, to heal deeply, and to give back generously. For those of us who carry memories of war and loss, it’s also a time to remember that we are still here—and that matters.

Let their memory be a call to action: to seek connection, to honor our own humanity, and to build a better future in their name.