EGG HARBOR TOWNSHIP – This year beautiful weather brought out many people along Zion Road and Ocean Heights Avenue for the Memorial Day parade on Monday, May 26.  The parade was followed by a ceremony at Veterans Memorial Park.

The High School marching band, crew team, local Scouts, politicians and other dignitaries lined the parade route. Praise Tabernacle Pastor Steve Rahter started the ceremony with prayer, and seventh-grader Lola Agabalogun read her essay about Memorial Day being more than a day off from school and the beginning of the summer season. 

Photos by Jackie Hanusey

Memorial Day
Written by an Egg Harbor Township veteran

Memorial Day… it leaves me with thoughts of countless others that have been absent throughout years past. I am so blessed to have lived long enough to have my hair turn gray. My face etched in character lines in conjunction with my years. My body wrinkled and my soul filled with the spirit of forgiveness. I've reached the age where the ‘happy hour’ is a nap. So many of our youth have never lived long enough to truly enjoy life and so many have died before their body has been riddled with the aches and pains of a more mature, full-fledged individual.

Surely over time my heart has been broken. How can your heart not break when you lose a loved one, or when someone suffers?  But broken hearts are what give us strength, compassion and the will to live. As a matter of fact, my heart has been broken… on the Wilderness Trail in the Thirteen Colonies and the Revolutionary War against England, on the depths of the Normandy beaches, on the frozen mountaintops of Korea, in the monsoon jungles of Siam and the sand-driven deserts of Iraq.

Today, there are more than 25 million living veterans who served our nation in times of peace, in times of war and in times of need. Many of them willingly entered harm's way to fight for our freedoms. All too many have died, a generation in the first curve of their young adult life. Not knowing what it is like to be a father, watching their child grow old; to be a son or daughter, watching their parents grow old or to be a husband growing old with their wife always in her glowing beauty.

Our distinguished veterans lay waiting as if they were on guard duty for eternity in fields of green pastures. They have a strategy in formation with their concrete namesakes and monuments unto their own. I speak to those we have lost on the fields of battle. There are remembrance days such as this; we as a nation sent aside to praise and ponder them on this day called Memorial Day. We honor those who died, and a God who lives.