"They shall grow not old,
as we that are left grow old.
Age shall not weary them,
nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun,
and in the morning,
we will remember them."
There were a lot of things I was going to write today, but the words just don't want to come out. This Remembrance Day is so different from every other one I remember experiencing, from grade one when my teacher told us about wars that happened a long time ago, up until last year.
Remembrance Day has always been important to me. I have always stopped to observe it, whether by going to a cenotaph, or watching the national service on television, or both. At school, we hold an assembly of remembrance every year. I remember thinking that the assembly in 2001 was a little more meaningful because it fell so closely on the heels of September 11.
In that same assembly was a grade ten student named David. Over time, I got to know him as a really funny and good kid, who liked to crack up his classmates and tease me about being as addicted to scrapbooking as his mother. His mom, Laurie, and I, would scrapbook together, and I'd see pictures of David as he was growing up, celebrating the holidays, and living life to the fullest.
David graduated in 2004. His grad write-up included a reference to Vimy Ridge, and the last two words were "GO ARMY". He had made up his mind to serve his country as a member of the armed forces, and earlier this year was deployed to Afghanistan.
My former student David was Private David Robert Greenslade, of the 2nd Battalion, Royal Canadian Regiment, one of the six Canadian soldiers killed April 8, Easter Sunday, 2007, when their LAV-III hit a roadside bomb in Afghanistan.
At the Red Friday Rally on September 28, when a local newsman suddenly trained a camera on me, the words came easily. But they were the "surface" words. The ones I have a hard time with are the ones that describe what I felt when I stood at the National War Monument at Confederation Square, and later in the Memorial Chamber of the Peace Tower, in Ottawa in June. And the ones I feel when I don a poppy, a reference to the famous poem "In Flanders Fields", knowing that it's also the flower used to make the drugs the Taliban uses to fund the war in Afghanistan -- to make roadside bombs.
So many thoughts, but so few words to articulate them.
We will remember them.
1 comment:
War never costs as much as peace. Its a bitter truth that the folks serving their countries, and their families, understand all too well. As a former serviceman, I still think of it as "we" lost someone. But the "we" for me is the Armed Forces.
I wish that for more people, the "we" was the nation. And encapsulated in that "we" would be the understanding that while a war - hot or cold - is never worth what you pay for it, peace always is.
Post a Comment