Shine forth upon our clouded hills

In the chill rain yesterday, two very different stories of loss. My sister and I took my nieces to the Remembrance Day ceremonies at the war memorial. I'd never been to any of the formal proceedings -- only watched them on TV, always moved by the now-quivering vets marching, the governor general taking the arm of the Silver Cross mother, the woman designated to stand infor every parent who'd lost a child in combat.

Actually going to the ceremony was more about the crowd than about the tropes of the tribute itself. My sister and I ended up losing each other at the beginning -- I was with Lulu and got stuck behind a barrier, while she was somewhere on the other side with Mica -- so my experience was fairly focused on a two year old in a soggy red snowsuit navigating a mass of people with a fair bit of calm and grace. She liked the elderly planes in the flypast, and she clapped for the veterans when everyone else did, though all we could see above the heads of the crowd were flags, and the giant television.

It's a complicated thing, remembrance day. Honouring people who fought and lived for ideals and country, recognizing the sacrifice of the individual for the collective good -- this is a good thing to do, something it's important to pay attention to. The nuances of loss and fragility of connection - the moms, the lines written in the now ancient veterans' faces -- are so moving. And of course, it's always contextual -- a "good" to honour the vets of the now decades old wars, the losses of the Afghan war more problematic, and where is the line between honouring the individuals and mindlessly condoning bad policy decisions?

And there is always an uneasy risk of glorifying Sacrifice when the social forces that push people into the military are rarely about "ideals" -- it's no accident that the Silver Cross mothers are usually from NFLD, where the military is one of the few viable career options. And our own "personal" ancestral war dead -- my father's father's brother, Joe, who was shot down over Germany in 1942, clearly joined the Air Force because it made an adventure, some kind of alternative to his small life as a young milkman.

I got Joe's military records from the Archives a few years ago, and the scraps of paper write a life of poverty, a punitive system, a smart punk with a lot of energy and few options. Letters from his high school and employer about how bright he was, stern assessments from his military testers of his intelligence but terrible ... can't remember the word, but they meant attitude and class, flunking out of radar school because he constantly went AWOL, two episodes of the clap -- one here and one in England -- that resulted in hospitalization, contracted from "girl met on train, amateur)" and "girl from London (amateur)." (Amateur clearly being Military-speak for Not a Prostitute, rather than Innocent Girl Ravished by Joe's Charms).

Then a couple of missions as a gunner, then anti-aircraft guns over Hamburg that met their mark. German civilian police reports, telegrams of missing then dead, then letters from the Air Force detailed Joe's effects sent to my great-grandmother -- totally about $27 in cash and a cheap suitcase. Ironically, it had cost me approximately $27 to get the file photocopied.

Joe as an undercurrent, today's war a terrible question mark (how do we wage a nation-state based war on a dispersed underground?), my niece a humming, unfettered tumble of joy drawing smiles from the crowd.

And then, later, a horrible store from F. He has a friend who had met someone online -- like our story, corresponded in different cities for a couple of months, felt a rich connection. They met a couple of days ago for the first time, felt the spark they'd hoped... they had food, he complained of a headache, they went back to his place, the headache grew worse, he collapsed, an ambulance, and then he was dead of an aneurysm. So much hope cut abruptly short.

It's so easy to say "live full" -- harder to not mouth it and let the irritabilities, the prickles, the fears of any quotidian moment overtake "be here now," richly seized life. But that's what those remembrances have to be for, really, a wedge into the assumptions we take for granted about our days. Gratitude for the now.