Thursday, November 11, 2021: A Day to Remember
By Chloe Mackintosh-Ribreau
I look around and see a bunch of tired teenagers being herded onto the bus. We all swear that we’re going to sleep as we drive to Ortona, and some of us try, but the sound of some people's music in their headphones and overlapping conversations isn't a great way to stay awake or to fall asleep. The inclement weather matches the mood of the day as if the sky recognizes what we have to do today, who we must commemorate. It mirrors the feelings we have as a group towards the dead and the fallen. We get off the bus, and everyone is jittery and nervous, especially those who are assigned to speak at the ceremony. Those who speak go to the front of the line as we file. We follow Alessandro and Elle, holding the Canadian and Italian flags. Even walking our students into the ceremony had to be organized into two single file lines and the moment arrives and we walk into the Moro River Canadian War Memorial Cemetery. Once we take our places near the cenotaph, Mr. B starts to call upon names and welcome important individuals. People made speeches and students read out poems, and the air suddenly felt thick with the solitude and sobriety of collective mourning. People with medals on their uniforms stood silently fulfilling their national or military responsibilities and paying their respect. The blur of singing and poppies, blended to create the feeling that even though this cemetery is large, and is populated by over thirteen hundred fallen Canadians, there are more, many, many more beyond its perimeter. There is no laughter, there is no joy, only the acknowledgment of their lives and in their memory.
Many years earlier, my mother would have felt the wet grass through her shoes, and smelt the sweat from other nervous teenagers mixed in with the adults wearing fancy cologne. She would have put down flowers on the same grave as I did that day, and she would have entered and left through the same stone gate. She would have felt the wind blowing against her kilt, as I did, and wondered, “Are there really so many people that this war claimed, when our group of students are such a small number?” as I did. And while I reflected on the circle of events that is my life now, I know my mother must have gone through some sort of feeling of deja vu when I sent her pictures on my phone. When she was a young girl at CCI, she passed almost the same pictures to my grandfather, whose father and uncle served and whose uncle is buried in that very cemetery. If life is a cycle, today it has finally gone around three hundred and sixty degrees.
