Why I Wear the Poppy

for Robbie

I wear a poppy over my heart because I have always worn a poppy over my heart. And as with anything good, it starts off as unquestioned habit, is reconsidered for its merits, and is reapplied with greater conviction.

                This year more than ever I remember it also as a symbol of many things that matter to me, one a late friendship with a veteran; it’s a symbol of what brought us to be friends, a symbol of a connection we shared.

                “Sacrifice” and “valour” and “heroes.” “For our country” and “liberty.” Words and phrases people use to justify the wearing of the poppy.

                It doesn’t need justification.

                I am a pacifist. War is atrocious. Like greed and hate, it is one of man’s simplest and greatest evils. Impossible to justify.

                There are men and there are souls that once were boys, and did what they felt was right or what they were told to do. They justified it how they could and how they had to.

                They faced the awful in the world and in themselves. They lay their lives and their innocence on a cold iron slab knowing that they were guaranteed the loss of one or the other. No retaining both.

                For those that survived that insanity, they returned to the world and they lived lives. They went on. They justified and they compensated because they had to find a way to be human again. They never forgot and they never let it go because they couldn’t. Who could? To let that go would be to forfeit their humanity.

                Where I live, there’s a man who was amongst the first to hit Juno beach on D-Day. He had signed up, trained, shipped out, and finally attacked with a group of friends from home. He was the only one of that group who returned after the war. For the next sixty years, he established himself as essential to his community. He was involved in everything. He coached, he volunteered, he was a cheerleader and an organizer. Tireless. Just to make his town better. Because he felt an obligation. Because he felt like he was living more lives than his own.

                That is why I wear the poppy.

                It is the symbol of my friend, a man who grew to be the best man in my life, an essential bond, even though it was in his own twilight years. We first bonded when he told me tales of the bloodbath of Ortona. Of depravity and horror and what he had to do to come through it, both alive and as a man. He changed my life, and every Remembrance Day for ten years I called him to tell him I loved him and to hear about the life he had made after he had put his innocence on that slab. Heard of the normal he had made after that brief, altering horror.

                That is why I wear the poppy.

                This year I can’t call him. This year is the first that Remembrance has a double meaning.

                It’s not about death, it’s not about victory, it’s not about intangibles like liberty and way of life. These are the things that those that came after must tell ourselves. In our selfishness to justify why we do it we make it grander, we talk about our way of life saved.

                To me, it’s not about our way of life. It’s about lives: those that were ended, and those that continued, changed.

                That is why I wear the poppy.