It's strange, Rosemarie Ceo says. She doesn't remember the morning at church, she said, or the limousine ride. Or the gun salute, or the burial at Arlington National Cemetery.
But she can still hear her son's goodbye at the bus station, as he left for the airport and Iraq.
On Sunday, Ceo lingered over that memory on her way to the Baltimore County Courthouse in Towson. There, people pledged that they would remember Cpl. Bernard Ceo, too.
The name of the 23-year-old national guardsman and nearly 30 others will be engraved in granite beside the courthouse — a memorial to area servicemen and women who have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan
The Baltimore County Monument Commission broke ground on the memorial on Sunday afternoon. The nonprofit plans to dedicate it in November.
Among the crowd Memorial Day weekend were three mothers who wore dog tag chains with photos of their children, killed far from home.
"I would like families to remember the original meaning" of Memorial Day, said Robyn Anderson, of Hereford.
"Please do not say, 'Happy Memorial Day.' There's nothing happy about it."
Her son, Norman Anderson III, scored the go-ahead touchdown in the football championship and married his high school girlfriend. And near the Syrian border in October 2005, he saw the car coming at his Marine Corps patrol. Anderson fired; the car swerved away. But inside seven propane tanks blew.
It was a homemade bomb. Anderson, 21, was killed. His patrol survived.
"He saved everybody," his mother said.
Take a moment before the barbecues and remember why we commemorate Memorial Day, his mother said.
"We're still losing men and women."
She plans a bumper sticker: "My cookout is at Arlington National Cemetery this weekend. Where's yours?"
Chris Lawlor, of the Baltimore County Monument Commission, said the group has been working several years to raise about $100,000 for the new memorial, Lawlor said.
State officials have pledged $75,000 in matching funds, she said. Crews will work through summer to raise the stone beside the courthouse, near the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
Toccara Green graduated fourth in her class at Baltimore's Forest Park High School in 2000. Then she fired a .50-caliber machine gun from an Army truck.
When the bomb burst in August 2005, shrapnel caught her beneath her armored vest.
Her parents, Yvonne and Garry Green, were at church when a neighbor called. Some uniformed men were outside their home in Northeast Baltimore.
Later, they kept telling Yvonne Green: "We're going to need you to sit down," she said.
No, she wouldn't sit.
"Just tell it to me straight."
Her daughter was 23, and Maryland's first woman killed in Iraq, she said.
On Sunday, Lawlor revealed plans for the memorial garden: a pathway and the stone, about 7 feet high. It was a bright afternoon. Rosemarie Ceo sat on a bench in the sun and listened.
More than a decade has passed since that day at the Baltimore bus station. She still wonders why he chose those words.
Did he sense something? Maybe he joked to calm her.
Or maybe it was because she hugged him so tightly, and for so long, that he said it.
"Mom, I'm not dead yet."