Remembering Those Lost in Wars Keeps Them Alive, Families Say

As hundreds gathered to pay tribute to Cherry Hill’s war dead, three names rang out beneath a massive American flag flying from one of the township’s ladder trucks.

Capt. Gregory T. Dalessio.

Lance Cpl. Jeremy Kane.

Lt. Col. John C. Spahr.

The township’s most recent fallen sons, who all died over the last decade in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, had their names added in half-inch high, gold block print among hundreds of others to Cherry Hill’s 50-year-old war memorial in a solemn ceremony Monday morning.

“If a government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from this earth, then there must be those willing to commit the greatest sacrifice of all, and we must never let their memory be forgotten,” Mayor Chuck Cahn said as he rededicated the memorial. “We honor those who paid the ultimate price to safeguard the ideals of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We also remember the families who have shared in their unimaginable sacrifice.”

Two of those families were on hand for the ceremony—township councilwoman Melinda Kane and Thomas and Maureen Pagano and Robert Dalessio, who carried a wreath placed beside the new section of the memorial.

For them, it was a chance to see the memory of their sons’ sacrifices preserved.

“It keeps him alive,” Melinda Kane said. “Just to hear his name, to hear people speak his name, means a tremendous amount.”

It’s been three years since Jeremy Kane was killed in a suicide bomber attack in Afghanistan, but to his mother, the intervening years have almost seemed at a standstill.

“Three years sounds like a lot, but it’s not—it just gives you a different perspective on time,” Melinda Kane said. “I see all of his friends getting older, and going off and getting jobs and marrying, and he’ll forever be 22. It’s hard.”

But at the same time, the moments like Monday’s rededication, or when she heard of a young man placing flowers beside her son’s memorial at the Katz JCC, make her realize the pain is not hers alone, Melinda Kane said.

“Things like that just means so much to me,” she said. “It’s not just a loss that my family has experienced, but it’s a loss that the community has experienced.”