Loss and Armistice Day

I attended Belfast City Hall's war cenotaph at 11am on 11th November. It was a focal point, I guess, to concentrate the mind on death and war. The sky was uniformly battleship grey and the multitude of umbrellas encouraged the rain to break the silence throughout. There were hundreds of us but most appeared to be alone. I thought of Wiłfred Owen's "old lie, dulce et decorum est pro patria mori" and tried to imagine traumatised non-patriots aiming their rifles too high, the conscientious objectors rotting for years in barren and disgusting jails, teenagers too young to fight but the old dispassionate generals looking the other way, the mothers without sons.

I never really paid too much attention to Armistice Day until this year. It has a greater resonance with me now because I understand the concept of loss in a deeper and more personal way than before. I do not need to empathise with parents who have lost their children to war because I can sympathise- I know, as far as one can, how they feel. Watching documentary clips of the time and reading personal accounts and poetry of the experiences of that generation is surprising in its ordinariness. Far from feeling dated it feels of my time as if these are my streets and my friends and my neighbours. Their desires, severences and anger is the same as mine- the desire for peace, severence from those I love and anger about disempowerment- and, as such, connects me to them in a deeply human way irrespective of chronological and geographical differences. 

Grief has taught me many things. One valuable perspective it has afforded me is that I should raise my head over parochialism and into a more universal view- to proactively search for connections with others and the identification of the narrative arc in the human story- universalism equates to unification, the commonalities shared by all of us.  I do not doubt that war has had similar effects on those who are forced into its violent sobriety and might be lucky enough to reflect- maybe they can also identify tendrils, valued alliances, across time and continents.

And those old generals who look the other way, cancers that they are, should hang their heads, weap with shame and tearfully beg our forgiveness.