Many Gold Star families wait decades to receive the remains of a loved one listed as a Prisoner of War or Missing in Action.

Some then wait again to stand in the Courts of the Missing to press a dime-sized bronze rosette into a hole pre-drilled in a marble wall engraved with the service member’s name, rank, and home state or U.S. Territory.

The tiny medallion publicly confirms an often epic recovery and identification effort always underway for missing American military personnel representing all five branches of service at various memorial cemeteries around the world.

One survivor of a family member in the “Missing in Action” file, retired Air Force Major Gen. Sharon Bannister, shared the difficulties of her wait in both cases as the keynote speaker on National POW/MIA Recognition Day — always the third Friday in September — last year in Honolulu at The National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific.

Just days before her sixth birthday, on March 7, 1972, the enemy shot down her father’s aircraft over Laos during the Vietnam War, according to the Stars and Stripes, a daily American military newspaper.

In 2007, a forensic lab in Hawaii identified his remains gathered from the crash site.

“(When) they placed two teeth in my hand, I was finally able to close my palm, and I felt like I was hugging my dad. I knew he was home,” Bannister said.

The problem was that until she participated in the bronze rosette mounting ceremony after her speech, the public — an estimated 5 million visitors annually, according to the Department of Veteran Affairs’ National Cemetery Administration — would have considered her dad still missing.

Reasons for the rosette hold up were “unclear,” according to the collaboration between the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency and American Battle Monument Commission.

Nevertheless, as we walk up to Memorial Day later this month, I appreciate the rosettes dotting the marble walls of the 10 roofless rooms — the Courts of the Missing — that honor the sacrifices and achievements of personnel buried at sea or lost on foreign soil while serving in the Pacific region during World War II and during the Korean and Vietnam wars.

Our family and my parents spent Thanksgiving week last fall together on the island of Oahu, in part to pay our respects at this cemetery.

The ABMC built it to bury 776 sailors recovered from Pearl Harbor after the deadly Japanese attack on Dec. 7, 1941, that forced the U.S. into World War II.

Certainly, the rosettes make one more connection between the living and the dead there, at the cemetery dedicated in 1949 and also known as the “Punchbowl Memorial Cemetery,” given its 112 ½ -acre location within the caldera of a volcano that last erupted 75,000 to 100,000 years ago.

A grand stairway leads visitors from the traditional burial grounds on the front lawns past the Courts of the Missing to a non-sectarian memorial chapel and map galleries. There, 15 operational maps made of tinted concrete and colored glass aggregate graphically explain key combat operations in the Pacific.

Lady “Columbia,” a 30-foot-tall stone statue of a woman who personifies the U.S., towers over the place.

Her sisters claim more fame.

Lady Liberty with her detached, determined look stands on Ellis Island in New York Harbor to hoist her torch and welcome immigrants. Lady Justice holds with dispassionate steadiness a sword and set of scales blindfolded as a symbol of unbiased justice.

But Lady Columbia — like the tiny rosettes — puts visitors like me in closer touch with tremendous grief and gratitude.

However frozen her body language, that is exactly what invites me to explore unofficial reflections in the midst of an official memorial.

She differs so much from her self-assured sisters.

For instance, Lady Columbia’s mouth is slightly agape. Her left arm hangs at her side, the laurel branch of victory drooping like a pompom after a spirit cheer in between plays.

Her right arm also has gone limp, and the palm of her right hand faces unnaturally outward, as if frozen in initiating a hand up or maybe a what’s up?

Mostly, though, it’s the wide gaze of Lady Columbia’s eyes.

As she stands in her sleeveless long dress, her sandaled feet on a pedestal sculpted to look like the prow of a Navy carrier, this Lady’s expression looks dismayed by what lies before her. She seems less composed — more aware of the complicated realities around the service members.

She looks real.

Tourists, like us, cannot ignore the sweeping panoramic view from her perch.

It includes Honolulu’s skyline, Pearl Harbor, and the iconic Diamond Head — another volcanic feature called a tuff cone for its steep, high rims created from volcanic ash after hot rising magma mixed with the nearby shallow ocean waters and exploded.

But Lady Columbia, she only looks down the staircase to watch over the Courts of the Missing sprinkled now with bronze rosettes and the mowed green lawns with flat, engraved headstones — her role in the sisterhood now clarified to me as the honest caretaker figurehead of the grief and gratitude within our collective memory.

More than 53,000 men and women in service to this nation and their family members — along with some Hawaiian royalty and high profile politicians and their families — are buried or otherwise memorialized, officially.

In 1966, ABMC dedicated the cemetery with the original eight Courts of the Missing to honor the sacrifices and achievements of 18,095 World War II American service members then all missing in the Pacific Theater (excluding those 36,286 American service members missing from the southwest Pacific, and now honored on a Wall of the Missing at The Manila American Cemetery and Memorial in the Philippines ) and 8,210 Korean War American service members then all missing.

In 1980, the ABMC built two more Courts of the Missing at half size to honor the sacrifices and achievements of 2,504 Vietnam War American service members then all missing.

Pam Mellskog can be reached at p.mellskog@gmail.com or 303-746-0942. For more stories and photos, please visit timescall.com/tag/mommy-musings/.