Lest We Forget...

Today is Remembrance Day. Montreal's official ceremony will be held at McGill this year. There will be cannon - a twenty-one gun salute. The McGill staff were sent invitations which told us we'd be hearing the guns and not to get startled.

You can imagine the scenario, right? Some Nervous Nelly who is so absorbed in the papers she has to shuffle that she doesn't know it's Remembrance Day, or that it's approaching eleven o'clock, hears some big guns going off, screams, pulls the fire alarm, the building evacuates, fire trucks come roaring up the street...

It could happen. And mostly because we as a country don't make a point of doing what we used to do on Remembrance Day.

We used to ALL stop work. The buses used to stop. The traffic stopped. People would stop what they were doing.

For a single, quiet minute. We would stop our daily lives to remember the lives given for our sake, taken for our sake. And we'd stand up quietly. For a moment. Think, for one moment. How horrible war was, and is. And pray to god it never happens again.

Well, that's most unlikely, people being people.

A number years ago, a rogue wreath-layer made headlines and caused a kaffuffle when she brazenly walked up to the cenotaph, uninvited, and laid a wreath on behalf of all the women who were raped in the wars.

I know it shocked a lot of people. After all, a lot of mothers of living sons are still shocked when they find out their little boys are "getting everything they need." And that's here in peacetime, with sex posted all over the billboards, in our faces constantly. Now, let me make myself clear: I am ALL IN FAVOR of sex! I just don't need to see it portrayed to sell stuff.

I remember watching the actual ceremony where this woman laid her wreath, and I remember what I was thinking. I was surprised at first, then I thought, well, that happens all the time anyway...

And over the years I've seen the tiny trickle of understanding that began when this woman had the balls to do what she did. It wasn't too long after that ceremony when we first heard about restitution for the "comfort girls" in Korea. A government-built and sanctioned system of brothels using captured women. Hey - to the victor go the spoils, no?

Unfortunately.

Well, there are many other wreaths to be laid, stories to be told aloud for the first time, things we need to think about, as a society, concerning the fallout of war.

I am a victim of World War One. Me personally, I have been affected by the death of my great-grandfather.

My grandmother was about four when her daddy was killed in battle. He had been sent out, he had done a tour, he had come home on furlough, and went out again, and then died.

Little Doris adored her daddy. All four-year-old girls adore their daddies. He meant everything to her. And when he was home on furlough, she heard him and her mother talking. She didn't remember hearing them, but she did have a terrible nightmare during that time that frightened her so badly she remembered it all her life, to the point where she even told me about it.

She told me she dreamt that her father killed her. That he was strangling her. She woke up screaming terribly and would have nothing to do with her father for days. He and her mom finally got through to her that she had dreamt the experience, that it didn't really happen, and she was finally able to trust her daddy again and cry in his arms how much she loved him, just before he was taken away got shot.

As she told me the story, she was an old woman, but it was obvious to me that the dream still frightened her, that she could still see, after all these years, the images that had so terrified a little girl.

I've had therapy, something that wasn't available to Little Doris. I've learned how to interpret dreams, especially the ones that stick with us. And I know what grandma's dream is, what caused it, and I understand its truth.

Little Doris overheard her parents talking about the war, and she heard things every day of her little life about how terrible a thing the war was, how ordinary, upstanding men had to kill other ordinary, upstanding, trustworthy men every single day. And that whoever had the most men left at the end would be the winner.

And even if none of this was said in front of her, she picked up on the fact that HER daddy, her wonderful, funny, loving daddy... was killing other people's daddies. Every single day he was away.

And she dreamt her beloved daddy was killing her. It might have also been an allegorical dream - her daddy might have represented the situation - the war itself. The war was killing more than men. It was killing the hopes and dreams of a generation of human beings. It was killing families, because those who were left at home to worry were having their family life disrupted, were having their hopes and dreams killed. There was no such thing as "normal", not for anyone.

And so Little Doris dreamt she was being killed. And her daddy died in the war. And her mother remarried, and had a third child with her new husband. And when the war was over, Doris' stepdad came home to Canada, to Quebec, and Doris and her brother and her mother and her new baby sister came in tow.

And then Doris' mother died. And that was it. She and her brother were sent away to an institution.

Not for long. Doris was now fourteen years old, and by her demeanour and determination she managed to get a job, a place to live, and got her brother to live with her, and that was how the little English girl came to live here in Quebec, and meet and marry my grandfather.

But now stop, for a moment, and think: what would have happened to Little Doris, if her daddy had NOT died in the war?

Well, he would have been there for her and her brother, when her mother died. And she'd have helped her father take care of Little Albert. And they would have stayed a family, in theory.

But that didn't happen. What did happen was, a young woman had to fight her way through her teen years and young adulthood, scrimping and saving her pennies in order to save the only living human being related to her, in order to bring her brother up. She had to be wise beyond her years, and tough beyond measure.

Yes, she "succeeded". She did bring Albert up, she did finally marry and have a family, she was always "good with money", she was always tough.

And there's where the OTHER dark side of the story comes in. Because she never learned how to turn it off. She never had a parent to get into an argument with, so she never learned how to compromise, she never knew that parents weren't always right.

So, as a mother, she was uncompromising. Very determined. She ran everyone's lives, always sure that what she was doing was for the best. She really believed that she knew best.

And that caused a lot of trouble in the lives of the people around her. Basically, everyone was afraid of her, and everyone did what she said. Even when she took over my life, either allowing or compelling my father to take me away from my mother, moving across the country, restricting my visits... Nobody had the guts to stand up to Doris.

And that's when the really serious damage was done to Little Debbie.

Now, this is actually so much water under the bridge. Like I said, I've had therapy. I made my peace with everybody, and I've moved on.

But I do have this weakness, this mood disorder. I've had more than one psychiatrist in my life. I'm in my early fifties now, and I feel like it's only in the last couple of years that I've learned to listen to other people's point of view. Pretty much all my life, I've been "certain" that what I was doing was "right."

Just like grandma. Because I learned that from her. That's how she got by in the world, and that's how I learned to get by. Even when I positively hated her, I still believed the same things she believed, about how people should be. Uncompromising.

Well, that didn't work. My first marriage crumbled shortly after my Daughter was born. And now my second marriage has gone by the wayside as well, though I do like to think my second husband had a part in that...

And who else is a victim of war here? Hubby. My second husband is also a victim of war.

His grandfather couldn't take care of his own two little boys because he was in service during the war, and they got separated, handed off to different distant relations. And all the horror stories we've heard about how orphans were treated when they were "taken in", how they were made to work long hours, were abused and neglected, weren't fed properly... all that came true for Hubby's father. And he, in turn, became a "hard man," who once told his own sons that the happiest time of his life was when he was in the navy. In the war.

A little boy who lost his mother and his father to different circumstances, but who also never learned to feel empathy for others, never developed close, loving relationships, became a hard man, and a difficult father, who never learned how to be around his own boys. An emotional cripple.

And his sons both suffered for it. I can't speak for Hubby's brother, but Hubby certainly has suffered, has learned to keep his emotions buried, never was able to let down his guard long enough to enjoy himself, always looking for the black cloud over his shoulder, waiting for the other shoe to drop... I used to joke that Hubby could find the cloud in any silver lining. But it's not funny.

And the pendulum of life has swung in every conceivable direction in all our lives ever since the first world war and the second world war turned men into killers and robbed them of their humanity. We, the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of these men, and the families they left behind, have suffered the loss of our patriarchs in countless ways. In mental illness, in obsessions, broken marriages, broken dreams, all of us carrying the scars inside, where they can't be seen, where they can fester and do the most damage.

And we, in turn, have handed down to our children and stepchildren, all our insecurities, all our fears and weaknesses that began so very long ago, in the killing fields of Europe, in India, in Africa and the Phillippines... It seems that we have taken the worst of humanity into our souls, like the bodies rotting in countless graves, our innermost beings have been sliced, blown apart, tortured, starved, mutilated, by what happens AFTER the wars had ended. By the inadequate society left behind. Still screaming inside, not even knowing what it was that killed our hopes, our dreams, our minds, our marriages and families.

LIke the bullet we never saw coming, we are injured in ways we cannot even begin to comprehend, by the loss of stability in our families brought about by whatever war was happening in our society at the times all our fathers were alive. And those wars changed our fathers, our families, our selves.

The fallout is much greater than anyone could have forseen.