On November 11th we remember and mark, as a collective family, the sacrifices and perils of wars fought and still waged. It is this annual reverential occasion that propels my mind to wander to what has gone before. Each year my thoughts return to memories of my family and reflections of growing up in the care of my wonderful Mom and Dad, who had vivid recollections of their own lives, particularly their experiences during the Second World War. This catastrophic event informed and shaped them and who they would become. How could it not? When Canada entered the war my Mom and Dad were sixteen years old. Having just lived through the depression, it didn’t seem that times could get much worse, but then wars don’t seem to grow out of prosperity, then or now. When my father was of an age, he enlisted. The only thing that was certain was uncertainty and here at home in Canada, day to day lives were lived gripped in a kind of tense unease. For those away from our nation, life was all too often, beyond words. The war ensued for six unbearably long years. One tenth of Canada’s citizens were enlisted in some way to service and nearly 100,000 of those were injured or lost their lives.
My parents shared their stories about Canada’s years at war with my siblings and me. My mother’s recollections can still make me feel as if I had watched the entire event unfold before my eyes on a movie News Reel before a picture show. Her musings co-exist with tremendous sorrow and fond nostalgia. The shock and fright of the bombing of London, boys in her town she passed love letters to in school who went away to fight and never came home, wool socks knit to keep soldiers warm at the front (my mom still makes to this day at the age of 90) and the day when the boys came back from the war and swelled the residences and classrooms of her third year at university in Toronto.
These thoughts and many more are added to my own personal recollections of having my dad both begin and end life in the early days of the month of November and my first sweet baby girl born in Novembers waning. I will likely watch The Glen Miller Story with Jimmy Stewart and June Allison at some point this month and I will cry as my heart breaks for all those young, talented and hopeful men and women who; loved by mothers and fathers, and husbands and wives and children and the like will never have the opportunity to share their special gifts with this world because of conflicts that take them far from home. What could they have become with only a little more time? And I will laugh and find comfort in the legacy they have left behind, knowing their stories will carry on and be shared and the moments of their shortened lives treasured.
Lest We Forget
Janet
