WASHINGTON — In the African Kiswahili culture, there are three ways of looking at the past. First is the past of the living, history that we ourselves remember. Firsthand memories.

The next Kiswahili category is called the sasha, the living dead. Dead but still living because we knew them and remember them still. It is the history of the recently departed whose lives overlapped ours. We recall their faces and retell their stories. They are dead, but they live in our hearts.

Finally come the zamani, the truly dead, those whom no one alive today has met face to face. We revere them but did not know them, and their history is remote.

I learned this from James Loewen, author of "Lies My Teacher Told Me," when he spoke in San Antonio a few years ago at a social studies conference.

As soon as Loewen explained this way of looking at history, a picture of a World War II veteran rose unbidden in my mind. A generation tottering between the living and the sasha, so many gone, yet a precious few remaining to tell their own stories.

Last week my husband and I visited the National World War II Memorial, the 7 1/2-acre monument on the Washington Mall that was dedicated last weekend.

And, I asked, for whom was this monument built?

For the living, certainly. The American Legion estimated that 160,000 World War II veterans and their spouses were in Washington over the Memorial Day weekend for the last big reunion.

On Tuesday there were still thousands of people there. I studied the old veterans.

The memorial is flanked by two stone pavilions, one for the Pacific Theatre, the other for the Atlantic. The veterans stopped there first. Beneath each arch, the names of the big battles: Midway, Ardennes, Guadalcanal. They paused and remembered. Normandy, Anzio, Iwo Jima.

Next they gravitated to their state or territory: 56 stone slabs, on each side a chiseled stone wreath. Here they had their pictures taken.

Leading up to the memorial are 24 small friezes depicting scenes from the war and the home front. Parachute jump. Artillery. Ships.

"Do you know what that is?" An old veteran asked the young man at his side. No, he didn't.

"That's an LST, a tank landing ship. It held 140 men, more than 300 feet from stem to stern, four .30-caliber machine guns ..."

And the boy will remember that Grandpa was part of the D-Day invasion and will tell his son about the LST, and his son will tell his son about the machine guns.

The next generation — my generation, the sasha — understands the memorial. Memories were deposited on every ledge. Photographs sealed in plastic wrap, copies of letters, of telegrams. Small flags. Big flags. We remember you, we miss you, we love you still.

A photocopy of a 1944 article from the Newark Star-Ledger, about hometown boy Pvt. Jonas Marias. He would have been 90 on Memorial Day this year, and looked forward to attending the dedication. He died in October; a son or daughter left the clipping.

A photo of brothers Frank and Alfredo Vaquera, from somewhere in Texas, fresh-faced and smiling in their uniforms. They both died in 2000, someone wrote on the bottom of the picture.

At the base of the state slabs, at the foot of the pavilions, memories are displayed. A purple heart. Flowers. A cap, a unit patch, a corporal's stripes, a major's gold oak leaf. At the foot of Massachusetts, a bottle of beer. Empty.

This memorial speaks to the sasha. We get it. We are the storykeepers.

I am less confident that this monument will carry a coherent message in the zamani. When we are all dead, those who lived the stories and those who heard them, what will this monument say?

With its massive acreage of granite and bronze it will say, "It was a big war and we won it."

No more, no less.

A hundred years from now, when the interpreters are gone, when the veterans are dead and their children buried, it will be an empty stone park.

The World War II veterans deserve their memorial: It's been a long time coming. But once they are gone, it just stone. Listen to the stories. Carry them in your hearts.

All else is just stone.

Susan Ives can be reached at suives@texas.net.