I must admit that in the past I haven’t put a lot of thought into Remembrance Day. It was a day off, a day to relax, not much else. I didn’t put a lot of thought into what this particular day symbolized. War like Canadians experienced in the two world wars is so completely foreign to me that I don’t feel a strong connection to this day.
This year has been different. I just finished reading a book (finished it today actually) that is set with World War I as the backdrop. It is set in Prince Edward Island, Canada. The main character is a girl of 15 when the war starts. The book follows her and her family as they are left behind while her brothers & friends go off to war in another part of the world. It has been wonderful to read. For the first time I’ve experienced (through a book anyways) what it was like to have to let your sons go, knowing you might never see them again, spending four long years hoping and dreading and having to continue on with daily life in the midst of this.
I don’t know how they kept going on, how they could get anything done when they knew their brothers or their sons were fighting in some major battle and you didn’t know what was going to happen and they were thousands of miles away and there was nothing you could do but pray and feel helpless and afraid and dread answering the telephone and dread hearing news of the war. I know what that ‘sick feeling in your stomach’ is like when you are dreading something so intensely. But to think this was their life for four years?!?! I can’t imagine it.
But I’ve had a little taste. And it was good for me. Remembrance Day means more to me today. I think I’ll try to do this every year around Remembrance Day: read a book or a story or watch a movie about war. It will help put things into perspective for me when I don’t have a reference point to help me understand. And maybe that’s the greatest legacy that generations before us leave behind. That war is something so many of us in Canada know nothing about. And we can live in peace.
Peace to you this day.