Letter: A time for solemn remembrance

By Letter to the Editor on November 11, 2021.

Dear editor,

Bittersweet the feelings and emotions can be when one is taken by the hand and shown a place where poppies bloom and grasses grow.

One thinks of beauty, but also of blossoms plucked before their time. One thinks of grasses scythed and yet returning greener and more resilient than ever before. One is reminded that there is a tomorrow, that yesterdays almost forgotten ought to be remembered, that flowers can return and reopen to full glory; that grasses, though trampled and abused, can and do rise to please the eye again; that those who gave their health, their limbs and their lives, did not give their all in vain.

Many of you have had the privilege of a visit to some such garden, such an occasion, somewhere, another time. Then you’ll know of what I speak. You’ll now that even the most hardened, the most leathery souled of us – those of us who claim to have seen it all and feel no more – will wilt and are reduced to eyes that can no longer see because of tears that will not be contained, of throats tightening until words no longer come.

November 11 celebrates not only the memory of all those who did not come home, or came home badly damaged, but all those who willingly stepped forward to do what they thought would be the right thing to do; those who were blessed and overcame, those who were in the midst of the battle of their lives against that age-old bane of mankind, that nasty bit of business known as war. With us at the day of remembering were many of those who took the full force of all this evil and what it had in its weaponry, faced it and stared it down, and who, with the help of God and good people, defeated it.

Come you all to remember and count our and your blessings.

Ted Kohlmetz

Medicine Hat

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