For Always

A number of years ago, two of my grandchildren were visiting their Nana and me when November 11^th rolled around.

“What’s ‘Membrance Day, Gramps?” the oldest asked.

“Re-membrance Day,” I replied.  “It’s the day when we honour the soldiers who fought in the wars.  Here in Florida, it’s called Veterans Day.”

“What are wars, Gramps?” the youngest asked.

I found it astounding, and heartbreaking, that they were still so innocent.  And I wished they could be so for always.

I had difficulty when I tried to explain the premise of warfare to them—the sheer gall and hubris and stupidity of humankind in seeking to settle what are sometimes legitimate grievances by killing each other.

Despite the fact that they couldn’t really understand the concept, I told them we try now to remember the men and women who gave up their lives in defence of our country and its values, in all the wars in which our soldiers took part.

“Why do we hafta remember them?”

“Well, I guess it’s because we hope we won’t ever have to fight a war again,” I said.

As I talked about it, the thought occurred that the war that resonates the most with me is one I don’t really remember at all. My parents did, though.  For them, it was the war, one of the most significant events in their lives, an event that shaped many of their attitudes and beliefs forever.

My recollection of that war has come through them, formed as impressions and feelings, prompted by bits of memorabilia, by oft-repeated stories, or by the singing of wartime songs.

I have a picture in an old family album, a now-faded, black-and-white snapshot with large white borders and scalloped edges.  It was taken at Christmas in my grandparents’ living room during the winter of ’44.  I’m in the picture, right in front on my mother’s lap, not yet two years old.  The whole family is gathered around us beside the Christmas tree.

My mother’s parents are there, and her three sisters.  Her sister-in-law and two of her cousins complete the group.  With the exception of my grandfather and me, there are no male persons in the picture…no sons, no brothers, no husbands, no fathers.

Whenever I look at it, I try to imagine what that Christmas must have been like for my family, most of them younger than my own children now.  I think about a song that became popular around that time, a young soldier’s promise—I’ll be home for Christmas…if only in my dreams.

Not one of my family’s young soldiers was home for Christmas that year.  Two of them, uncles I might have grown to love, never did come home. I remember hearing my parents talk of them long afterwards.  I’d hear words and phrases that prompted my recollections—words like wartime and overseas, or phrases such as V-E Day and killed in action.

“If Jimmy had come home from overseas,” they’d say, “he’d be almost eighty now.  Can you imagine!”

Together, they’d sit quietly, remembering how it was.

So when my young grandchildren asked about Remembrance Day, I tried to convey those same feelings to them.  Not what war was really like, because I don’t know.  Rather, how I still feel when I hear that song at Christmas time, or when I look again at that old snapshot.

I knew they’d be unable to comprehend a war that ended more than half a century before they were born, or even understand what their great-grandparents went through.  But, in hearing about it from me, I hoped they would develop some sense of the meaning of freedom and democracy, and of the sacrifices that were needed and made. 

And I hoped that, once they knew, perhaps they’d understand why we remember. 

For always.

_{© J. Bradley Burt 2021}