remembrance

November 11, 2026

I always think of my grandmother on this day during the eleventh hour minute of silence. She has been gone for many years now, but I remember her long black coat, and stockinged ankles. Nice shoes, or boots if it snowed. Oblivious to the cold. Sullen and silent. She would carefully lay the wreath by the cenotaph during the ceremony in the village where we all lived. Where she and my grandfather were building their life before the war.

My grandfather did not die in the war, but she told us that the person that left for war was not the same person that came back home. I do not know what he experienced. Assuming it was terror. He was there, in Normandy on D-Day. I was only five years old when he died. Died from the second of two heart attacks in the morning while eating corn flakes. As my brothers and I started to get older details like that started to emerge.

He wanted to teach you boys how to fish. So. Badly. She was always telling us things about who he was. Granddad would say this, or that. Would do this, or that. All that he might have done. Things she wished he could see. She missed the man he was before. After he came back home she would sometimes wake in the night to find him terrified, and taking shelter from artillery strikes that haunted his nightmares. They would have called that shell shock back then, not PTSD. There would not have been enough knowledge or medications back then to treat it.

I have wondered sometimes over the years if she wanted us to grieve and mourn the loss of him the way she did. I don't blame her for not wanting to carry that all alone. What could we do though? We were just little kids that were with him only for a few years when he was sick, before he died. I have no memories of him. To me he was just pictures she would show, and stories to be told. An empty chair in the corner where he used to sit reading books and smoking cigarettes.

For decades, or maybe even centuries, young men have been, and are still being ordered to slaughter each other, die, and blow shit up. I guess that is part of who we are as humans? Why?

The worst of the worst of us, inept moronic psychopaths, keep manipulating, buying, and lying their way into positions of power. They care only about power, money, and occupying territory that has things that they want. They want everything to be the way their fragile egos dictate. They don't care about who gets stepped on or crushed in the process of trying to make it happen. If they say it is about anything else it is a blatant lie. No matter how much land they take over, no matter how much power they have, no matter how much wealth they accumulate, by any means, it is, and never will be enough. It feeds a corrupt and unsustainable system that benefits themselves, and only a tiny percentage of the population. Past generations of those pieces of shit got away with stealing MOST for themselves. The current abomination wants it ALL.

Just the tip of many icebergs I suppose.