In December, a woman at my son’s school asked if I would help “lay wreaths,” and I said yes, because I pictured a craft fair.I want to be honest about how wrong I was. I told my son we were going to make decorations. He brought a glue stick.He is eight. He was very proud of the glue stick, and I did not have the heart to stop him, mostly because I did not yet know myself.On the appointed morning we stood at the veterans’ cemetery at eight a.m., in sleet, with what I estimated as four thousand people and what my son estimated as “a million.” The truth was somewhere between us. I am bad at counting crowds.A man with a microphone explained the rule. You take a wreath. You find a headstone. You place it. And before you walk away, you say the name on the stone out loud.That is the whole rule. Say the name.I asked the woman next to me why, and she said, “A man dies twice. Once when his heart stops. Once when nobody says his name anymore.”I have been to funerals in two countries, and I have never heard grief explained so efficiently.So we walked the rows in the sleet, and we placed wreaths, and we said names. I said the name of a private who died in 1944 at the age of eighteen. I said the name of a nurse. My son, carrying his useless glue stick in his coat pocket like a sidearm, said six names, carefully, the way he reads out loud in class, and at the fourth one his voice did something, and he pretended it had not.Around us the cemetery sounded like low rain. Thousands of names, spoken once each, into cold air, gone the moment they were said.In my country we carve the names of the dead into stone, so that they endure. Here, once a year, they are spoken aloud, and vanish. I asked an old woman which way was better. She was placing a wreath on a stone that had her own last name on it. I did not ask whose stone it was. I still do not know, and I think about it.She said, “Stone is for the dead, honey. The saying is for the living.”On the drive home my son asked if we could come back next year.We will come back every year.Here is what I did not expect. I have started saying the names on war memorials when I pass them. Quietly, so no one hears.My son does it too now. He believes it is a custom of our family, something we brought with us from Japan.I have decided to let him believe that.