Take the time to really remember

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 10/11/2015 (3596 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When was the last time you observed Remembrance Day? Not just took the day off, but actually observed it?

Speaking for myself, it’s been awhile since I’ve engaged with Remembrance Day in a meaningful way. As a kid, I always treated the Remembrance Day school assemblies in elementary school as solemn occasions, prissily shushing my fellow classmates who desecrated their poppies by turning them into lips or sliding the straight pin through the top layer of skin on their fingers. A voracious reader, I was mildly obsessed with the children who were forced to hide during the Holocaust — girls such as Anne Frank and Régine Miller, who were around my age when they had to endure the horrors of war. Those were the people I always thought of during those two minutes of silence.

But without school enforcing my Remembrance Day participation, I sort of stopped participating. And so, I decided to participate in the public tour of Brookside Cemetery’s Field of Honour — the largest and oldest military interment site in Canada — on Sunday with about 60 or so other Winnipeggers from all walks of life, including several families with young children.

We got the rare opportunity to hear the stories of a diverse cross-section veterans, including John Stoyko, a Second World War veteran, Hugh MacKenzie, a Korean War veteran, Pedro Correia of the Portuguese War Veterans Association, and Lt.-Col. Annie Perry of the 1 Canadian Air Division, as well as Cpt. Wright Eruebi, the public affairs officer of 1 Canadian Air Division, who both did tours in Afghanistan. Their experiences are varied, but they are united by their courage.

“I want to thank you all for your presence here,” Perry said, choking up. “It means a lot to veterans to see that people care.”

Viola Davidson, 65, was attending the Brookside Cemetery tour for the first time. When asked why she decided to spend her Sunday paying her respects, she broke down into tears. “I’m sorry — it’s emotional. Both my mother and father lost a brother — my father’s brother in the First World War, my mother’s in the Second World War,” she said. “We went to services when I was young and respected the two-minute silence. The importance was emphasized. I’ve been a nurse, and we often just worked right through it. I worked a lot of Remembrance Days, and we didn’t even notice.”

Davidson’s husband died two months ago, and mortality has been top of mind for her. “He lived a full life,” she said. “These were kids.”

Indeed, looking at the military headstones at Brookside, it’s tough not to be struck by just how young many of these soldiers were. It’s tough not to think about mothers such as Charlotte Wood, who lost five sons in the First World War and is buried at Brookside Cemetery.

In July 1936, she made a pilgrimage to Vimy, France, for the unveiling of the Vimy Ridge Memorial and was presented to King Edward VIII. “I have just been looking at the trenches, and I just can’t figure out why our boys had to go through that,” she reportedly said to him.

He replied: “Please God, Mrs. Wood. It shall never happen again.” A few days later, she placed a wreath on the tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Westminster Abbey in London on behalf of bereaved Canadian mothers, becoming Canada’s first Silver Cross Mother. She died in 1939, just as the Second World War was beginning.

And every Remembrance Day since then, a different Canadian mother has laid a wreath at the foot of the National War Memorial in Ottawa.

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The sacrifices made are staggering.

Suddenly, the simple act of wearing a poppy and taking a few moments of silence feels like the very least we can do.

Near the end of the tour, we each placed a Canadian flag at the foot of a soldier’s headstone. We were encouraged to place our flags, step back from the stone and, if possible, read about the person resting there.

I left a flag for Pte. Whitford P. Birch, who died on July 9, 1918. He was 15 years old.

jen.zoratti@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @JenZoratti

Jen Zoratti
Columnist

Jen Zoratti is a columnist and feature writer working in the Arts & Life department, as well as the author of the weekly newsletter NEXT. A National Newspaper Award finalist for arts and entertainment writing, Jen is a graduate of the Creative Communications program at RRC Polytech and was a music writer before joining the Free Press in 2013. Read more about Jen.

Every piece of reporting Jen produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print – part of the Free Press‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.