As those who read me know, I speak often of military service, of my family’s involvement, of the deep respect I hold for those who serve and have served. But today, that respect carries a heavier gravity than I can recall feeling in many years. The world we are living in feels as though it is shifting under our feet, and while I cannot fully name what we are on the brink of, I know in my bones that it is frightening. On this Remembrance Day, the meaning of sacrifice feels sharper. Clearer. More urgent. It demands something from us.
I have attended Remembrance Day ceremonies for sixty-six years. I may not remember those very early ones, but I remember every year from the time I was six. I remember my Brownie uniform, my Girl Guide sash, attending beside Air Cadets. I remember laying wreaths for my grandfather, and later for my father. I remember attending ceremonies with my sons, one of whom would later stand in uniform among other serving members. I remember standing there in bitter wind, in snow, in quiet fall sun. Some years I attended with family, but most years I went alone with my children, not as a tradition, but as an instruction. To remember has always been for me a deliberate act. A responsibility.
And yet, somehow, we are forgetting. Some measure that forgetting by how many show up to a ceremony. But attendance alone is not remembrance. If the only day you acknowledge the sacrifices of those who came before us is the day the bugle sounds, then yes, at least you came. But let’s be honest. Let’s be bold. If that is where your remembrance begins and ends, how can you look at what is happening in the world right now and not recognize that the ground beneath us is becoming less stable? That we are, once again, entertaining the same ideologies, the same hunger for division and dominance, that cost millions of lives in the last century?
When I watched the national ceremony today, I forced myself to truly watch and to feel it. To let myself remember that when my father enlisted in 1941, he was eighteen. He stood beside other boys who stepped forward because they understood something we now seem to resist seeing: that freedom is not self-sustaining, democracy is not a given, and peace is not guaranteed. Those boys are few now. Those who remain carry the memory of what happens when hatred, extremism, and power-hunger go unchecked.
Canada lost more than 66,000 soldiers in the First World War. Another 172,000 came home bodily wounded but numbers were not kept for those spirits that were damaged. In the Second World War, we lost 45,000, and 55,000 were wounded. In the Korean War, 516 more. We lost lives in Somalia, in Bosnia, in Afghanistan. And we carry the unseen casualties, trauma, grief, fractured families, the quiet suffering that never makes the history books.
But today, we are witnessing the most horrific disrespect of what they fought for that I could have imagined. Not from some distant villain. But from everyday complacency. From the normalization of authoritarian rhetoric. From the cheering of cruelty as if it is strength. From the casual acceptance of lies, hate, and division, especially from those who claim to “love freedom.”
I find it difficult to reconcile that on a day as sacred to me as Remembrance Day, I have to speak about politics at all. But how can I not? What was fought for is being eroded. And not subtly.
I hate that I speak so often of American politics. I don’t want to. I want the United States to deal with their own chaos while we remain steady here. But we are too geographically, socially, culturally, economically intertwined to pretend their descent into authoritarian celebration does not affect us. And here, within our own borders, we are watching admiration for those very same anti-democratic impulses grow among people who stand under the same flag my father fought to protect.
I do not know what to do with this pain. This fear. This anger. I can list adjectives until the page collapses under them, none of them feel sufficient. What I do know is that Remembrance Day is not just symbolic to me. It is not a cultural performance. It is not background noise between errands. It is sacred. And when the world carries on casually today, shopping, scrolling, rushing, and arguing it feels like a bell ringing that no one hears.
So I wear my poppy intentionally today. Because it is a visible bell. A signal and a reminder that remembrance is not passive. That memory is not nostalgia. That silence is not neutrality.
On my sixty-sixth Remembrance Day, I am asking, no actually pleading that we understand the gravity of the world we are in. That we recognize we are not immune to the forces that tore other nations apart. That we stop comforting ourselves with the myth that Canada is somehow untouchable, incorruptible, insulated by politeness.
Do not show up to a Remembrance Day ceremony if you also cheer for authoritarianism, division, cruelty, or the dehumanization of others. You cannot honour sacrifice while celebrating the very conditions that required it.
I do not want my children, or their children, to live what their grandparents and great-grandparents endured. I am scared.
But remembrance is not about despair. It is about responsibility.
And we still have time to choose who we are.
Nancy's Notes 