Lost and Found

I have always been moved during Remembrance Day ceremonies.

First, as a kid because it was a day that was given a sense of profundity like no other in our house -- from the polishing of the service medals the night before, to seeing my father as flag bearer in the parade or hearing him bark orders to the colour party, or stamping his foot with a smack and snapping his hand to his forehead in a salute, to the loud, alcohol fueled Legion blazer wearing vets around our kitchen table later in the day.

As a young adult I kept that profound respect for the day and the tears normally came with The Last Post wavering from the bell of a cold trumpet or the lonely squawk of a piper. Not aware at all where the melancholy came from I cried simply 'cause it was sad.

When my father died, him doing so with some significant sense of relief on my part (the anger and resentment of a "lost boyhood" ran deep) one cold day every year in November became a healing catharsis for me vis a vis my dad. I came to, well not forgive him exactly 'cause it was his job to be my father and he screwed it up royally, but to understand and give him a break, as it were. He died a broken man in many many respects and that the ultimate falling apart essentially took so long is in a convoluted way a testament to the strength he had, as misdirected as that strength was. It was the strength to keep the war at bay for much of his life; to hide it from himself so he would not just collapse in on himself and so that he might spare those around him, perhaps. I believe his war experiene simply caught up to him; its demons consuming him via his reticence and refusal (inability) to do much at all about it. It was during this period of coming to terms with a dead father I didn't "know" but was resentful of, that I often broke down completely during Remembrance Day ceremonies -- weeping, slobbering yes, for the stupidity which are war deaths, but much much more for my father's loss and for my own resulting from his loss.

I have noted over the past few years that while there remains a strong emotional significance of the day for me -- both as a day of remembrance of war sacrifice, generally, but also as a day to connect to the one thing that allows me to hold onto my father in a positive, respectful way -- I have not been emotionally connected in any true sense. This year in fact I found myself feeling as if I was at the service simply because I expected as much of myself and not much else. A bystander with a 3 cent poppy stabbed into my coat near my heart.

Then with the service all but over, from a couple of blocks away (I attended the Soldiers Tower service at UofT) large guns were fired. The concussion was such that even at that distance it felt like a physical push and car alarms went off in a nearby parking lot. What that powerfully violent firing of the howitzers did to me was to "knock the scab off" and I found myself weeping for my father (the wartime and post-war versions) and for those who faced and fired such weaponry in the theatre of conflict, and selfishly for myself mourning the man who should have been busy being my father but wasn't, as I hurried to try and get a photograph of the guns firing.

Lest we forget.