When November blows itself into our lives, a season of remembrance begins. First, we have the almost pantomimical commemoration of the failed gun powder plot and then we move into the solemnity of remembering the victims of war on Armistice Day. We wear poppies in the lead up to the 11th and we wear them with gratitude for the sacrifice that so many soldiers made to ensure the liberty and freedom that we all enjoy in this country.
We are the lucky ones. The soldiers who gave their lives were not lucky and neither are the civilians in so many other countries on this planet. Those innocent Israelis and Palestinians who are dying as the war in Gaza continues, those families displaced in Ukraine … their lives are as far removed from ours as is possible.
In my work as celebrant for Shoobridge Funeral Services, I officiate at many funerals. It is a humbling job. In the last couple of months alone, I could have knelt down in awe at the lives of some of the people to whom we were there to say goodbye; the people who have made such positive impacts on the lives of others.
And one of these was a lovely man who, with his just-as-lovely wife, had fostered more than 40 different children, some of these for a number of years at a time. They also adopted four siblings and brought them up in a loving stable home. They simply, as their son said, ‘changed our lives.’
He had a lifelong interest in the First World War and one of the poems that a friend read out at his funeral was ‘In Flanders Fields’. It includes the haunting lines: ‘Short days ago / we lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, / loved and were loved, and now we lie, / in Flanders Fields’.
The poem is printed below, in memory and in solidarity with all those victims of war, the wars passed and the wars still raging, the families caught up in the nightmares of Gaza and Ukraine, whose families have been destroyed and can never be joined together again.
In Flanders Fields
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
- John McCrae
