Walking along the Wall tonight, making my way backward in time, I was contemplating the 58,307 names that make up its one hundred and forty memorial panels. The few people still out on this moonful and chilly night passed mostly silent, or talking in reverent whispers. Every so often, though, someone passed speaking so I could hear, and more often than not these conversations were stories of the so awfully many dead named here.

In the last group that passed me, clearly having visited the inscribed name of a loved one, one of them was explaining to the others that the separator between the names had been changed to a cross because their soldier's remains had been located.

I envisioned the thousands of similar friends and family, each coming in kind to the wall to visit a name that marks the terrible sacrifice of their husband, or their friend, or their brother. It occurred to me then, for the very first time, that in many cases, the name on the wall is the only thing that remains. And the question finally materialized in my heart... what happens when there's nobody left to come for the name? What if there never was anyone?

I don't know Eddie Lee Jackson, Jr., but his name, somewhere in the middle of panel 39 on the west wall, stood out to me. I thought about the finely-hewn cuts and grooves that lay in the granite, collecting the pollen of the spring, the rains of the summer, the dust of the fall, and the snow of winter, year after year, maybe without ever knowing the touch of a loved one who remembers him.

I don't know if anyone ever comes for Eddie, or ever has, but I reached out and touched his name anyway, and tried to remember a man I did not know.

I hope that's enough.