Remembering with gratitude

This week, we celebrated Remembrance Day. You might have been at work, in a public place, or even listening to the radio in the car “at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month” when you were reminded to stop and observe a minute’s silence. Perhaps someone played the Last Post, or read lines from ‘The Ode’:

“At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them.”

I am fortunate that in my family, those who served, survived, coming home to family and friends. I am aware that this was often not the case, and I stop and remember with gratitude.

This year, my sister has had time to comb through old family photos from our parents’ early years and our own childhood.  There’s the 1970’s birthday party, children in paper crowns beaming over their very own can of soft drink; the 1959 line-up of fourteen first cousins ranging in age from 18 months to 18 years; my grandfather, home on leave from the British army in 1940, standing in his garden.

Each photo has both a back-story and a connection to the present: the childhood friend who keeps in touch some 40 years later; the cousins who grew into librarians, midwives, engineers and environmentalists; my grandfather’s ability to bring a garden to life in a new country, pottering around his shade-house with a terrier at his side.

In a year with so few of the usual markers of the passage of time, these photos have taken on extra significance. Looking through them has given me a chance to stop and remember with gratitude.