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Illustration by Drew Shannon
It is a damp, grey day early in November. I am feeling rushed with a big to-do list and not enough time. The kids are coming back from their week at their dad’s after school today, and soon I will be on solo parenting duty. Homework. Soccer. Trumpet practice. Lunches. Laundry. Cooking. Piano lessons. Play dates. Ballet lessons. Recital practice. It is a blur of hugs and sibling rivalry, laughter and dog fur. I adore every second.
But, I don’t get as much of my work done when they are with me.
The kids came by with their dad before school to pick up clothes my daughter Elvie needs. Standing by the front door, minutes away from the first school bell, both kids ask, “Are you coming today?”
“Coming? Coming to what?”
“The assembly”
“What assembly?” This is the first I have heard of it.
“The Remembrance Day ceremony, we’ve been working hard on it,” my son Cosmo says, his voice serious, hopeful and tinged with a tiny, vulnerable shyness.
Then Elvie, “Me too! Please come!”
There goes my work day.
I spend 20 minutes churning through her bedroom; Elvie’s third-grade class is closing the ceremony, and her teacher gave her instructions to wear black pants and red and white tops, for impact. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t the clothes that created the impact.
I arrived at the school and found a seat in the first row earmarked for parents. There was hardly anyone else there. I wondered if my kids had made a mistake. Was I crashing this ceremony?
Students eventually began to file in, a little quieter than usual; that muted giddiness that they do when they don’t quite know how to comport themselves. Then a steady stream of parents filled the chairs around me.
The gymnasium was packed. Three hundred kids, 25 teachers and aides and about 80 parents, wet raincoats and squeaky shoes. We all looked at the tiny stage with its rickety stairs on wheels. The droopy heavy black curtains. The wooden church pew style benches that line the back. The yellowish fluorescent lights. How many thousands of kids have trooped through here over the years?
A teacher somewhere said “shush.” We were about to begin.
The new music teacher I had been hearing all about wore a uniform from the Band of the 15th Field Regiment army reserve and stamped her shiny black boots loudly on the floor.
The room hushed even more. The school choir opens the ceremony with a song.
Next the Grade 6 class awkwardly walks to the stage and nervously passes the microphone to each other as they recite In Flanders Fields.
Another song and then, projected up on one of those ancient pull down projector screens – the kind that always has a dirty string dangling from the metal handle – a video called Highway of Heroes: Footage of fallen soldiers in coffins gently placed in hearses for their final journey along Ontario’s 401 between Trenton and Toronto.
This is when my tears start. Maybe this is the universal mother in me who feels pain with the mothers of these fallen soldiers. Maybe it is the selfish part that cannot imagine what I would do if one of my children felt the call to service, or was forced to fight in a war. My face is wet. My eyes are burning. I feel the uneasy side eye of the dad sitting beside me who hasn’t stopped checking his phone since we got here. I breathe into my feelings, relieved that I have not gone numb to it all. I compose myself. The video ends.
The shadow play begins (my son is in this one). There is a sweet rustling of kids taking their places. A snare drum bangs again and again, while students in silhouette salute before dramatically dropping to the floor. There is something comical about how these 11-year-olds fling themselves to the ground. A tittering of laughter flutters around the room. The Grade 2 teacher reaches over to “Shhhhh!” the loudest. There is a palpable softening in the room. Laughter. Inappropriate. Necessary.
Now we watch the dark outlines of students carrying caskets constructed using cardboard boxes that just last week delivered the neighbourhood’s Amazon orders. It was haunting. I wanted to clap. I wanted to weep. I was crying again. We were asked to hold our applause.
My daughter’s class was last. They arranged themselves carefully on the stage, joining the choir. The room quieted and they sang Nothing More, written by the Alternate Routes.
We are love, we are one
We are how we treat each other when the day is done
We are peace, we are war
We are how we treat each other and nothing more …
And tell me what it is that you see
A world that’s full of endless possibilities
And heroes don’t look like they used to
They look like you do
I am now full on sobbing. The guy beside me is still on his phone.
I lock eyes with my daughter, reading her soft face. Confusion. Concern. Sadness. Understanding. Love. Compassion. Or maybe I am projecting. I know full well she doesn’t yet know just how much we are getting wrong in this world.
Walking home I am lost in thought and emotion.
Heroes don’t look like they used to.
They look like you do.
Kate Shepherd lives in North Vancouver.
I can never know my great uncles but I can visit their names at war memorials in Europe
Reading Dad’s wartime letters introduced me to a man I thought I already knew
The war stories my father told me are even more relevant today