How we choose to honor the glorious fallen on Memorial Day differs from person to person. How one opts to remember those who have made the ultimate sacrifice isn’t necessarily important, so much as the actual act of remembering them.
For 7-year-old Mason’s family, heading to Wilmington National Cemetery in order to place American flags at the graves of soldiers who had died in service to their country had become a yearly tradition.
Yet on one such visit, Mason’s mom turned around to find her son gone. She began a frantic search, only to find Mason sitting at a particular soldier’s grave.
The name on the headstone was Sergeant TJ Butler, and Sarah instinctively knew her son felt a connection with the soldier buried there…
Sarah explained: “Mason had a lot of questions. He wanted to know if he had a son and a family, and wanted to know more about him.”
For some inexplicable reason, Mason felt drawn to the final resting place of Sergeant Butler. Over the next few weeks, the young boy and his mother continued to return to the cemetery so that he could pay his respects.
Little Mason even drew a picture and wrote a note to the soldier, sealing it within a plastic bag so that it would remain untarnished by the elements.
Of course, Mason wasn’t the only person who wanted to remember Sgt. Butler. The late soldier’s own mother was a regular visitor to his grave, and was taken by surprise when she arrived at the cemetery one day to find Mason’s note upon her son’s headstone.
She said: “The letter that Mason left us touched our hearts to know that there is someone out there that still cared.”
It transpired that Sergeant Butler had been killed in Afghanistan in 2012 – his mom was so, so touched that Mason had taken the time to honor and remember him, though he had never met the man in life.
Ultimately, Mason and Sgt. Butler’s mom crossed paths in the cemetery, striking an unlikely friendship forged by the purest of causes.
For more on this tear-jerking story, watch the video below:
We think all soldiers, past and present, deserve to be honored like Sgt. Butler!
If you agree, and want to pay tribute to those who paid the ultimate sacrifice for their country, share this article on Facebook.
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