A Note of Thanks on This Memorial Day.

Each morning on NPR, I hear Rene Montaigne or Steve Inskeep announce the day's number of deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Hearing this number, I think of the families and friends whose lives have been irrevocably changed by a late-night phone call (because those calls always come when you're asleep, while you're safe in your bed).

Every day I think, "What are we going to do?", and every day a reply comes: "I don't think anyone knows what we're going to do."

"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of
the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a
manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes
me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know
for whom the bell tolls;
it tolls for thee."

-- John Donne