Somebody picks it up. If you leave something at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, a National Park Service employee will come along and collect it. Not throw it away. Collect it. It gets a number. It gets cataloged. It goes into a box in a storage facility that is not open to the public, on shelves that run up toward the ceiling. They have been doing this since the wall was dedicated in November 1982. More than four hundred thousand objects. Combat boots. Dog tags. Medals. Photographs. Letters written to men who have been dead for fifty years, by people who still had something they needed to say to them. Nobody planned for any of this. The memorial opened, and people started putting things down at the base of it, and somebody at the Park Service had to decide what the policy was going to be. What they decided was that you do not throw away a letter written to the dead. There are 58,307 names cut into that wall. The people who leave these things are not asked to sign anything. Almost all of them are anonymous. They walk up, they set it down, they leave. And a federal employee, whose job title has nothing to do with grief, walks the length of that wall, picks up a letter that was never addressed to her, and puts it somewhere it will be kept. Curators have been opening those boxes and writing down what is inside for more than thirty years. You are allowed to walk away from a grave. The country decided it was not going to walk away from what you left there. 🇺🇸