![]() “This ceremony gives her current family the opportunity to say a proper goodbye, while marking her grave with a special headstone.” “She was left in an unmarked grave, so we are here to finish what was left undone,” Hitt, who organized the memorial, said. Last month, nearly 100 locals came out to Atlanta’s Greenwood Cemetery for a remembrance ceremony in honor of O’Brien, 100 years after her death. “I was really flabbergasted,” said Cawthon, wondering why his grandmother never mentioned her sister to anyone in the family, “but it gave me a little closure, learning she was in Atlanta.” She was buried without a marker at Greenwood Cemetery, less than an hour from her great-nephew. Mihiel in December 1921, just two years after O’Brien’s death. They informed Hitt the body had been brought back to Atlanta aboard the USAT troopship St. To honor the late O’Brien’s dedicated service, Hitt - through his work with the World War One Centennial Commission - contacted the French Embassy in 2016 to ask if they’d be interested in holding a memorial service at her grave. “You do not know what it’s like for us to give her up.” “You her people, may keenly feel hurt that she’s buried among strangers, but the ravages of this war have created a bond that you cannot explain,” Dantzler wrote in a letter to O’Brien’s sister following her death. She was only 35, according to Atlanta Constitution archives. O'Brien was buried with full military honors alongside soldiers in Blois. Even on her deathbed, chief nurse Caroline Dantzler recalled, O’Brien scoffed at the idea of having a doctor tend to her rather than focus on the ill soldiers. On April 18, 1919, after contracting spinal meningitis, she died from infection. Months later, according to Hitt, O’Brien began complaining of headaches amid the great Spanish influenza pandemic. In January 1919, O’Brien’s Emory unit was told to make its way back to the United States, but she and a handful of others chose to stay behind to continue serving the countless wounded soldiers in need of medical care. “It’s as if she wanted to understand where these men came from, the horrors they must have witnessed,” Hitt said. ![]() When the war ended in November 1918, O’Brien spent her free time collecting French and German artillery shell casings at the Verdun battlefield. “I cannot rest while more men are being brought in than we can dress,” she’d say to concerned colleagues, according to Hitt. Jackson Allgood, often recalled an admonished O’Brien making the rounds despite looking quite ill herself.
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