Another Remembrance Day post.

Driving to church this morning, I heard an extraordinarily eloquent and moving Remembrance Day tribute in which Alberta native Susan Kent Davidson shares the story of her uncle Clyde Gladwin Kent, who enlisted in the Canadian Army during the First World War and died during the Battle of Passchendaele, at the age of nineteen. To listen to the piece, visit this page on the CBC website.

Though she was born decades after the War, Davidson grew up with a vivid awareness of her uncle's sacrifice and brings his story to life by reading from some of the letters that he wrote home from Europe. "When I'm reading these letters," she says, "I'm aware that people now - almost nobody now, I think - would write quite that way, would think quite that way, and yet I feel touched by it over time, I really do. I knew people who thought and talked like that, or at least came from a time when you thought and talked like that. . . . I want people to remember what Canada was like not even a century ago, what people's lives were like then . . ."

The title of Davidson's reflection, All the Boys I Knew, comes from the answer that her aunt gave when asked why she had never married: "All the boys I knew died in the War." On the whole, Davidson does an excellent job of conveying the impact that a long-ago war had (and still has) on individual lives. I hope that hearing her words provides a meaningful opportunity to reflect on what this day is about. AMDG.