Today is Remembrance Day.
While I remember him most days, my late father Flt. Lt. Ronald Leslie Lowman D.F.C. of the Royal Air Force, is especially on my mind this day each year. So is his father, James Alfred Lowman, a Sergeant of the Middlesex Regiment, who I never had the privilege of meeting. And so is the moment I first saw grown men cry. It was when, still in short pants, I went with my father to the reunions of 47 Squadron and watched them tear up as they raised a glass to comrades they lost in the war. The toast was always the same, and simplicity itself : “To Absent Friends”. Because no more needed to be said. I remember being surprised at how rough men could be so moved by the passing of those they had often known only for days, and who were gone in an instant. But they were.
Remembrance takes so many forms.
Memorials in Europe to the dead from the wars of the 20th century are everywhere. While Vimy towers over all others in size and in meaning for Canadians, my fondest memory is of a Canadian war graves cemetery near Nijmegen, Holland where, to their great credit, Dutch school children come each month to tend the graves of Canadians who liberated their country in 1945. They plant flowers and trees, pull weeds and memorize names, all as part of a national undertaking to ensure there is no forgetting. And when they are done, they chatter and play among the headstones. I remember having to scold another foreigner, who loudly complained that such conduct was disrespectful. Because no one, it seemed to me, would be more pleased by it than the boys who were buried there.
Ground Zero in New York City, a month after 9/11, was two yawning holes in the ground. But already a memorial - ringed by a wire fence, covered with wreaths, tiny shrines and faded, plaintive notes seeking news of the missing. In an endless line of grim and silent Americans who shuffled along its length, I watched a young boy climb onto the shoulders of a friend for a better look. And listened to a elderly man quietly chide them: “Not here, boys. Not here.” The 9/11 Memorial took a decade and 1.5 billion dollars to complete. A remarkable woman named Amanda Sacks spent two years of her life simply determining the order of the names which ring the Memorial’s twin reflecting pools. So they would not be abecedarian. So they would be deliberately and carefully arranged to ensure those who were close in life would be adjacent in death.
“The Response”, Canada’s National War Memorial in Ottawa, is an extraordinary creation. Twenty-two perfect depictions of Canadian service people - infantrymen, a pilot, a sailor, a kilted soldier, a cavalryman, a mechanic, a stretcher bearer, a nurse. And - so Canadian - a lumberman. All moving forward in answer to the call of duty, with the common purpose we now seem unable to find. All passing beneath the allegories of peace and freedom, placed so close together there can be no doubt they are inseparable. The bitter irony - that it was unveiled and dedicated to the dead in The War to End All Wars a mere three months before the start of the Second World War - is lost on no one. Yet, in a place where they get so many things wrong, it is a shining example of getting something right.
There is an old cemetery where Gilly often takes me for a walk. She is unfailingly respectful of its almost 200 years of residents, and remarkably forgiving of its No Dogs Allowed signage. No Pets Allowed would be less blatantly discriminatory. Most of the markers she does not pee on are spare. A name. Two dates with a little line between. Often an age - added to help those readers who struggle with math. Sometimes a short epitaph - to give small comfort to those left behind. Dotted throughout today are tiny Canadian flags. Most mark a grave of a Canadian veteran who made it home, and hopefully died in their bed at a ripe old age. The others mark headstones erected by anguished families whose sons and daughters died in service overseas and were buried - as Commonwealth troops have always been buried - where they fell. Families who could not bear to be without a memorial nearby.
Elder Advice? We are wonderful at memorials. Large and small. We lavish time and effort and money on all these entirely appropriate works of collective memory. And then we stand back, satisfied, and in appropriate awe of what we have done. But fail to see those the dead have left behind.
Something is not right about that. And we all know what it is.
Memorials are intended as reminders of what those who are gone did, in the hope that, by their example, those who remain do better. So, perhaps the most fitting memorials to those we remember today would be visible only in the evidence showing that the needs of those they left behind are less.
This Remembrance Day, Elder Advice will be donating to the Veterans Transition Network: https://vtncanada.org/
What we do for the dead is right. What we do for the living is simply not enough.
Well said
Brilliant as usual, Tim. My high school principal, Arthur Wilkinson, was the nephew of Colonel John McCrae. Every Armistice Day, as it was then known, he read his uncle's famous poem to the school assembly. The last year he was principal, Arthur Wilkinson broke down and almost didn't complete the reading. The Town of Mount Royal High School in Montreal had the motto,"Sit Tuum Tollere" (Be Yours To Hold It). The yearbook was "The Torch". Because of Arthur Wilkinson and the memories I have of my father, who was an artillery captain in WWII, I recite quietly to myself "In Flanders Fields" every November 11. Thanks Tim for helping us keep in mind why the poppy remains such an important symbol.