delible ink

…my grans, all of them, who faced the fear of uncertainty and mortality, on foreign lands and domestic soil.

…the grandfather I never knew, taken not by war but by a failing heart.

…the grandfather I knew, left battered and stricken for the remainder of his days. Screaming out in the night at horrors left seared in his mind. A stoic, though, living hard and long. Until the personal disease – not the social disease of war – that we fight this month did to him what anti-tank artillery could not.

…the two young boys, sitting in the front row of the movie theatre, laughing at the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan.

…my sadness and disgust.

…my understanding in that moment of why we must all never forget.

…that it is not war we remember, but the lives lived and lost, the fear and bravery, the humanity of our brothers and sisters, far away in geography and our own understanding, who to this day step into harm’s way.

…that most of us don’t know the restlessness of lying down at night with our own mortality.

…to understand.

…to share that understanding with those that come after us, further removed from the past.

…to remember. Always.

~

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders Fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders Fields.

- John McCrae