Reflections on Anniversaries of the Dead

An anniversary of events feels like an electromagnetic shadow - a chalk outline around the souls of those haunting it.

There is a faint, white noise type hum in the background of everything we do during these dates and our lives hum with the life force of those who have gone “beyond the veil,” without us…like a whisper we thought we heard or the fleeting vision of someone dashing past us just out of the corner of our eye.

It is almost as if the dead live again and bring to us the lessons they wished they had learned when they had “their turn.” 

I really feel that.  It is like walking too close to a highly charged power line or an electric fence or static electricity…the almost imperceptible energy that raises the hairs on your arms.  I hear or read the stories of dead Great War soldiers and I feel them all around me.  It is impossible not to.  And, really, there is an obligation to tune into those voices, feelings, words.  No one yet lives who walked those battle fields or floors of homes.  No one yet lives who signed the papers and sent to the killing fields of Flanders the blossoms of youth and a generation of artists, poets, painters, and politicians; farmers, bankers, and teachers;  fathers, sons, and brothers; mothers, daughters, and sisters – the likes of whom we have not seen since.

The sacrifice was much too dear, the price far too high, and if you look at Gaza, the Ukraine, Iraq, Afghanistan, North Africa – any where – you will see that we did not learn anything from that sacrifice.  In fact, a mere twenty years after the cessation of the hostilities in France and Belgium, the world was at it again with many of the same key players.

A complete slap in the face of those young men who believed what they were told:  that they were fighting the war to end all wars.

I cannot imagine, in anyway, what it must have been like for the fathers, veterans of the Great War, to send their sons onto the battle fields of the next war knowing what they knew about what war was really like; a knowledge they, themselves, did not have when they were 20 year men signing up and heading out to Flanders. 

I cannot imagine how they dealt with the memory of their war while hearing in the news the details of the war their sons fought.  Those six years must have been a continual flash back for them – with no way of easing the horrors that probably revisited them in fits and starts…so much worse than they did in the years immediately following their war during which time they forced all of the images and pain deeper and deeper down.

I believe that those of us who survive significant trauma have a line to, are “plugged into,” others who have suffered, like there is an “energy signature” sent out by our brains.  It’s like our brains register that frequency because we are “tuned into” that frequency based on the fact that our individual trauma has “tuned” our brains into the “trauma frequency.” And because energy is never-ending, the energies of trauma remain always – sort of “floating” around for anyone to “tune into.”

As I have said, anniversary dates amplify that “frequency,” I think, making it easier to tune into those who lived the events which scarred them.  The larger the numbers of people affected, the more powerful the frequency.  So then, is it any wonder those souls walk again, with more clarity than before, a century after their horrific deaths?  In addition, those who engage in acts of remembrance are focusing their attention to those who have passed, lending even more energy to their “frequency.”

Maybe that is why on anniversaries of death, we feel a more profound connection to those we have lost than during any other time.  There seems to be a lead up and then on the day, there is a strong surge and we dream about them or hear “their song” or smell a smell that reminds us of them.  We are “plugged into” them.  I have had this experience several times in my life.  Sometimes I was comforted by the connection, sometimes I was puzzled, sometimes I was scared, and sometimes I was made even sadder – missing them all the more.

As I said yesterday in my intro to yesterdays post, the ghosts have started to whisper.  This doesn't mean I need a trip to the psychiatrist’s office.  I have been sensitive to this since childhood.  What it does mean is that I need to listen and record the whispers to give voice to the murmurs of the dead.

I am both excited and terrified for the day, in the not too distant future, when I walk those still scarred fields of Flanders – so full of shadows those fields will be.  I will be a divining rod for screaming souls.

The First Gas Attack  by William Roberts

These next four years are going to be beautiful and sad for me and others like me…those whose frequencies are “tuned” to the suffering we have shared with others.  For those who have family members who died in the Great War, I am sure the familial blood will sing to you to tell the stories of your warriors - be they soldier or healer. 

For those who are sensitive to these things this is an honour and a burden, both.  And, yet, for me, I would not trade it for a life lived in silence – muted to those whispers. 

We hear you beloved “mouthless dead.”

I hear you.

Through Their Souls to Mine: The Anniversaries Begin

One of the many paintings/sketches I have made over the years of this subject.

These days I have been feeling out of touch and impotent when it comes to the strike.  I have been feeling like I have nothing interesting to say that hasn’t already been said a thousand times so I have changed the focus of my writing.  

I am sure that I have little new to say about the topic I have been steeped in for decades…almost on the verge of obsession…but I need to write about it all the same.  I stumbled upon this obsession 20 summers ago whilst I read Eric Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. 

The Great War, World War One, has been a passion of mine for a long, long time.  Twenty summers ago I was reading All Quiet... and getting to know the struggles of Paul Baumer and his friends, German soldiers, in the Great War.  Paul is a poet, a playwright, and a gentle, beautiful soul.  He, in my mind, best represents many of the young, artistic, sensitive men sent to the battlefields of that “war to end all wars.”

I have a very vivid memory of reading this book that summer:  my oldest son was then nine months old.  He was my first baby.  He was plump and soft and beautiful and I loved him (still do) with my whole soul – the kind of love you have when you see that first baby and hold them and smell them.  They are your everything.  He would reach up and touch my cheek when he nursed.  His little brown eyes filled with love and something else – something I still don’t know what it was…comfort, peace, trust…I don’t know.

One particularly hot summer afternoon I was reading the book while I was nursing him and trying to get him to go to sleep for a nap.  I had reached a very sad section of the novel – there are many - this one was the saddest.  I kept thinking about how I would feel if this baby in my arms, my son, had been one of those young men in this novel – ones who would never come home to their mothers - and I began to silently weep. One of my tears landed on his face.  He opened his eyes and looked up at me…and I will never forget this…he took his chubby little hand and touched one of the tears on my cheek, unlatched himself from my breast, and said “mama?” as if to ask me why I was crying.  This, of course, opened the flood gates and I just held him close and cried tears for other women’s sons.

That baby boy is 21 years old now and I can’t quite shake the fact that if I sat here a century ago, in one weeks time my oldest would be off to Valcartier to train with the other young men for the CEF (Canadian Expeditionary Forces) to fight, and probably die, in the mud of Flanders.   That 21 year old now has a 19 year old sister and an 11 year old brother who, 100 years ago, would most certainly have lied about his age, in the last years of the war, to join his brother.  He has asthma but he wouldn’t care.  An ocean could not keep him from his beloved older brother. 

That story had been lived out a thousand, thousand times during those four bloody years.

I promised myself that summer 20 years ago, that I would learn all I could learn about this war and I would make it my life’s mission to never forget those who had fallen in a war that no one seemed to want to remember. 

So I did.  

I started to read and collect books, memoirs, artifacts, and pictures from the Great War.  I have pictures of men I have never met from families I do not know; “adopting” them from the dusty military antiques shop I frequent in Victoria.  I could not let them go to people who did not understand what their sacrifice really meant.  I must admit that it is a little creepy to have the images of people hanging around the house from someone else’s family but I figured that I “adopt” other people’s kids all of the time, “adopting” their brothers, dads, husbands, or sons would be ok.  At least they were coming to a home where they are constantly in the open – where people can see them and honour their memory.  I just wish I knew their story.  Maybe someday I will.

I decided that if I was going to write anything any more, it would be thoughts, honourings, and remembrances of those who slogged through the mud of Belgium and France, climbed the cliffs of the Dardanelles, sweated in the sun of North Africa, or “kept the home fires burning.”  These people, of whom no one survives, shall be remembered in my house beyond the 100^th anniversary of the conflicts.  I had a place for them before that and I shall have a place for them until I am dead and gone – and then I will see to it that my children and their children pass on the knowledge and the faces. 

Too high a price has been paid for them to disappear into sepia nothingness.  

Those faces could have very easily been faces of my beloveds.  They could have been my worry, my longing, my grief to bear.  Only time protected us…time and chance.

And so it begins.

You will see into my soul through theirs.