Highway of Heroes

This week was, of course, when we do a lot of looking back. My kids’ school does an incredible job of bringing Remembrance Day to life. The assembly is poignant, relevant and brings me to tears every year. My eldest son’s Grade 7 class sang The Trews “Highway of Heroes” song while this video was shown. The interesting thing is that all the talk of war and peace seems to touch my children much more profoundly that it ever did me when I was their age. I was lucky to not know any family members who when to war and when I was growing up in the 70′s and 80′s in Canada, other than our peacekeeping forces, our country was not sending soldiers off to fight overseas. Today, it is quite different. All too frequently there is another ramp ceremony broadcast from Afghanistan and footage of the procession of cars and hearses along the Highway of Heroes (Hwy 401 in Ontario), a road I have travelled more times than I can count, back and forth from Montreal where I went to university and on weekends down to my husband's cottage in the Thousand Islands. I cannot imagine what it would be like to travel it as the parent of a fallen soldier. We live near a base and my boys actually ran their cross country race through it’s beautiful woods and fields where other mother's sons train to be sent to Afghanistan. Remembrance Day is far more relevant and real to my children than it ever was to me and while I am sorry that our world doesn’t seem to have changed since the “Great War” or any other since I am glad that my boys understand why we must never forget the sacrifices that others have made so we can live.