A Promise Made at a Graveside
It started with a single funeral on a cold Tuesday morning in November 2012. Gerald “Jerry” Mosshart, a 58-year-old retired electrician from rural Nebraska, stood at the edge of a military cemetery and watched as a 23-year-old Army specialist was lowered into the ground. The chapel had been nearly empty. A handful of relatives, two uniformed officers, and a bugler standing at a respectful distance. No crowd. No strangers who had simply come to say, “We see you. We honor you.”
Jerry had not known the young man. He had simply seen the obituary in the local paper, noticed the military notation, and felt something pull at him, something he still struggles to put into words more than a decade later.
“I just kept thinking, this kid went somewhere most of us never go and did something most of us never do,” Jerry said in a conversation with a local veterans’ organization newsletter in 2021. “The least I could do was show up.”
So he showed up. And then he showed up again. And again. For over ten years and more than 140 funerals across his region, Jerry Mosshart has made it his quiet, unsponsored, unpublicized mission to attend the funeral of every fallen or deceased veteran soldier in his county and the surrounding three counties. He has never missed one.
What He Actually Does at Each Service
Jerry is not loud about his presence. He does not introduce himself to every family member or hand out business cards. He arrives early, finds a seat near the back, and simply bears witness. If the family notices him and asks who he is, he tells them honestly: a neighbor, a community member, someone who wanted to make sure their loved one was not sent off without a full room.
Over the years, his approach has evolved slightly. He now carries a small American flag pin that he leaves anonymously in the guest book area, along with a handwritten card that reads: “Your service was seen. Your sacrifice is not forgotten. From a grateful neighbor.”
He does not sign his name.
“It’s not about me,” he has said repeatedly to the few journalists and community members who have tried to profile him. “If I put my name on it, it becomes a story about Jerry. And it’s not about Jerry. It’s about them.”
The Funerals That Have Stayed With Him
Over a decade, certain services have etched themselves into Jerry’s memory more deeply than others. He describes a funeral in 2015 where the deceased veteran, a Vietnam-era soldier who had lived alone for thirty years, had no family present at all. Just Jerry, the funeral home director, and a chaplain.
“I held the folded flag,” he said quietly. “Because someone had to.”
There was another service in 2018 for a 31-year-old woman who had served two tours in Afghanistan and died by suicide after returning home. Jerry sat in a pew packed with her friends and family, and he wept alongside strangers who did not know his name. Afterward, her mother found him near the door and hugged him without asking who he was.
“She just said, ‘Thank you for being here.’ I couldn’t speak. I just nodded,” he recalled.
These are the moments that keep him going, even when the drive is long, even when the weather is brutal, even when the grief in the room is almost unbearable to absorb.
What Jerry Says He Has Learned
Ask Jerry Mosshart what ten years of attending military funerals has taught him, and he will sit quietly for a moment before answering. He is not a man who reaches for easy platitudes. But over time, he has distilled a handful of truths that he carries with him.
- Grief is not private, it is communal. Jerry believes deeply that mourning was never meant to be done alone. “We’ve gotten too isolated,” he says. “We think grief is something personal to be handled indoors. But humans have always grieved in groups. We need witnesses.”
- Showing up is a complete sentence. You do not need the right words, the right relationship, or the right credentials. Your physical presence communicates something words cannot.
- Service is more common than we acknowledge. Sitting with so many veterans’ stories has shown Jerry that quiet, devoted service exists everywhere. “Every one of those men and women had a whole life of choices behind them. They all chose something hard. We should talk about that more.”
- Anonymity is underrated. Jerry insists that doing good without recognition is more sustainable and more pure than doing good for applause. “When nobody’s clapping, you find out real fast if you actually believe in what you’re doing.”
- Death deserves ceremony. In an era where funerals are increasingly minimized or skipped entirely, Jerry is a quiet advocate for marking endings with intention. “A life happened here. That deserves a room full of people, or at least one person who cared enough to come.”
The Ripple Effect He Never Expected
Jerry started alone. He still sometimes attends alone. But word has spread, as it tends to do in small communities, and in the past few years, others have begun joining him. A retired schoolteacher named Patrice drives from two towns over when her schedule allows. A group of four men from a local VFW post have adopted the same practice in their own county, inspired after hearing Jerry’s story at a community dinner. A 16-year-old named Cole, who lost his grandfather to a service-related illness, now volunteers to attend alongside Jerry whenever a veteran dies without close family.
None of them organized this formally. There is no nonprofit, no website, no donation page. It is simply people watching one man show up, and deciding they want to do the same.
“I think people are hungry for ways to do something real,” Jerry reflected. “Not something that requires a big platform or a lot of money. Just something real that costs you some time and some of your heart.”
A Call to Witness
Jerry Mosshart is now in his early seventies. His knees ache on cold mornings. The drives are longer some weeks than others. But he has not missed a service, and he does not plan to.
When asked what he would say to someone who wanted to do something similar in their own community, he gave a characteristically simple answer:
“Find out when the next one is. Put it in your calendar. Go.”
There is no grand philosophy behind what Jerry does, no theological framework or carefully constructed personal brand. There is only a man who decided, on a cold Tuesday morning over a decade ago, that no soldier in his corner of the world should be buried without at least one person in the room who chose to be there.
That decision, made quietly and kept faithfully for more than ten years, has touched more lives than Jerry will ever know or count. And perhaps that is exactly the point.