Leo sisters, we celebrated our birthdays together over campfires on the Northumberland shore; cut sticks from the alders, whittled sharp ends, roasted wieners and toasted marshmallows to charcoaled perfection. We dragged our cardboard-box doll carriages down the dirt road to our granny’s house, and climbed the swaying silver maples, daring each other to go higher and higher. Marion always prevailed. She could skip with two feet when I could skip with only one, and turn cartwheels across the lawn, her coltish legs and black braids flying above her head.
Until our late teenage years, we shared a small bedroom under the sloping eaves of our storey-and-a-half house in Oromocto and slept together in a saggy double bed. We wore each other’s clothes to school. A few days before I was to graduate from high school, we buried our father. Abruptly thrust from the kingdom of childhood, we spent the following summer months visiting our grief-paralyzed mother in the psychiatric ward of the Saint John Hospital.
Two years later, we each got married—within two months of each other. In the early seventies, when I was an undergraduate at the University of New Brunswick, Marion, Russ and three-year-old Jeff lived one floor below me in the Park Hill apartments overlooking the Saint John River. Some days, I’d hear a faint knocking, and unlock the door to see my freckle-faced nephew smiling up at me. He would toddle down the red-carpeted corridor to the stairwell, mount the cement stairs to the second floor, pull open the heavy fire-door and find my apartment—by himself. A few minutes later, I’d be opening the cookie tin when the phone would ring. Is he there yet? Marion would ask, and laugh with relief.
We both got degrees in English and in education, and became teachers—Marion in elementary schools in Winnipeg, Ottawa and Halifax, and I at a college in Kelowna. Like mirror images, we each had two children, and journeyed together along the rough road of motherhood. We shared its joys and challenges in letters, phone calls and summer visits, watching our babes morph into school-age kids … adolescents … adults. At the turn of the millennium, we buried our mother, and supported each other through the anguish that came with being orphans in our fifties. Last November, I joined in her exultation when her grandson—Jeff’s son—was born, the primogeniture of our family’s next generation. And in the past five months, I’ve commiserated in her all-consuming worry while Jeff was in Afghanistan.
Now, I must descend with her into the hell of our most fearful nightmare—one of our children dying before we do. I wake to the smell of coffee, and a sound like the soft cooing of doves—the murmuring of a contented baby. I go downstairs to the kitchen. Marion stands in the sunlit window holding her grandson. For the first time, I see my sister as a grandmother, proudly embracing her treasure; and see her for the first time as a mother-in-mourning, grief already etching its fine lines in her face, darkly circling her eyes. And I behold for the very first time the bluest eyes, the rosiest chubby cheeks, the heart-shaped face and dimpled chin of Jeff’s baby son, made in the image of his father.
I smile, for the blessing of this beautiful child; at the same time I cry, for his father’s eternal absence and my sister’s loss. I put my arms around them. “I am so broken …,” Marion whispers. We look into each other’s eyes. I can feel it in her body, so fragile it could crumble in my arms. I hear it in her voice, cracked and dry. I see it in her brown eyes, brimming with tears. “How is this possible?” She shakes her head. “Before he left, I asked Jeff if he knew what it would do to us if anything happened to him.”
“And what did he say?”
“He said nothing would happen to him—that he’d be okay.”
Did he really believe this? Could he have gone unless he believed this? Jeff was no raw young recruit, harbouring youthful delusions of invulnerability. He joined the military at thirty after a decade of university studies. He embarked on the Afghanistan mission as a mature, thoughtful man. Was his response to his mother’s question meant to quell her fears as he headed off to a war zone on the other side of the world? Was he, like all soldiers, playing the odds in God’s lottery—that significantly more would survive than be killed, that he wouldn’t be one of the unlucky ones?
Before he left for Afghanistan, Jeff must have looked death in the face. Forty-two of his comrades had already been killed—one a friend from his regiment, Nichola Goddard, also a forward observation officer. Like every deployed soldier, Jeff had to ensure that his legal affairs were in order, had to choose a photograph to be issued to the media in the event of his death. He posed in his dark green uniform in front of the Canadian flag, knowing there would only be one reason that his family would ever see this picture—enlarged to a 24-by-36-inch framed colour portrait and delivered to his grief-stricken family. When you see these photos of our soldiers in the media, you’ll notice that none of them are smiling.
This picture isn’t the one Jeff chose to be released in the event of his death. Rather, he selected one taken in Afghanistan: He stands in front of his crew’s LAV—Lucky 13—dressed in his tan camouflage uniform and helmet with dust goggles attached. The desert sun lights up his face, the boyish freckles on his sunburnt nose and cheeks. His hazel eyes squint, but his gaze is direct. And he is smiling, a knowing half-smile. It’s a photo that seems to say amor fati, love of one’s fate—not fatalism—but love of the life one is called to live.
I. BIRTH
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come …
William Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”
NOVEMBER 11, 1970
On a grey November morning, the smell of snow in the air, a young man and woman will soon cross a threshold. They will enter a three-storey yellow brick building. A hospital, built high on a hill, overlooks a town nestled between two rivers, the meandering Oromocto—which gives the town its Aboriginal Maliseet name—and the mighty Saint John, which flows hundreds of kilometres southeast to the Bay of Fundy. The man carries a small white suitcase and a large shoulder bag, a red corduroy bag packed with flannelette diapers and blankets, tiny nighties, terry-cloth sleepers, hand-knit woollen sweaters, bonnets and booties. With his other hand, he opens the door wide for his young wife. She catches a glimpse of her round silhouette mirrored in the glass door. I’ll be casting a different reflection the next time I pass this way, she thinks, feeling her belly silently quaking.
Settled into the hospital bed, her long dark hair fanned out on the white pillow, Marion hears the skirl of bagpipes drifting up the hill from the cenotaph—a pibroch so familiar she can sing along in her mind:
There was a soldier, a Scottish soldier,
Who wandered far away and soldiered far away,
There was none bolder, with good broad shoulder …
Between contractions, that rush in gentle waves every ten minutes, she envisions the slope above the river, the piper in a red-green tartan kilt; wreaths studded with poppies; a grey granite monument engraved with the names of fallen soldiers. A Canadian flag flaps in the wind; wires clink against the steel pole. Grey-haired war vets in navy berets and blazers, with gleaming medals, stand in solemn salute.
“The Last Post,” the bugler’s call, echoes through the hospital window: They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old. “The last time I went to the cenotaph,” she tells Russ, sitting in the armchair beside the bed, “was with Dad—three years ago, I think. We walked together down the hill to the ceremony. It must have been a Saturday, or he’d have been in a parade himself on the base.”
Father and teenage daughter crossed the stubbly school field behind their house, the wind whirling yellow leaves around their legs. She wanted to ask him about his war—the Second World War, she’d read about in history class. But he never talked about it. He was a ma
n of few words; spoke more with his wide hazel eyes and his flashing grin. Only once when she was a child, thought to be asleep upstairs, she’d overheard him tell his brother about his platoon entering a village in Holland: “Bullets started flying—zinging over my head, coming from every direction … I’ve never been so scared in my life.” Maybe he told his stories to his buddies at the Malagash Legion or at the Sergeants’ Mess happy hour, exorcised his demons over one too many pints of Moosehead.
He had survived that day in Holland, and that war. He’d survived to become her father four years later, but not long enough to become a grandfather to the child about to be born. That day they strolled together to the cenotaph was his last Remembrance Day ceremony. The following year he was in Cyprus, wearing the blue beret of the United Nations Peacekeeping Force. And the spring after that—when he was forty-five years old—“The Last Post” sounded at his funeral. Sergeant Clifford Murray’s final duty concluded.
Water gushes between her legs. Her baby awakens from its sleepy sojourn, and commences its first dangerous journey, moving down the constricted canal of birth. Through the long afternoon, the waves of contractions mount into tsunamis that pull her under into dark swirling currents; until they finally break, leave her breathless and panting in their wake. She resurfaces to the squeeze of a moist hand on hers, opens her eyes to glaring fluorescent lights and Russ’s face, smiling uneasily. Daylight wanes and night comes on—a Herculean twelve-hour labour—until she feels the head, bears down and pushes out the crown of damp dark hair. The doctor’s gloved hands ease out the broad shoulders, first one, then the other. At 8:38 p.m., a blood- and mucus-coated body slips through the narrow opening into the world. A bleating cry, then the words her family has been hoping for nine months to hear: “It’s a boy!”
She cradles the miracle of his nine-pound body next to her, strokes the velvety pink fingers curled against his cheek. She is struck by the weight of this tiny being, the weight of responsibility she now carries—his life has come from her; his survival depends on her. So this is what it means to be a mother. Since that early spring annunciation—the crocuses just sprouting in the gardens—when she walked into the doctor’s office a twenty-year-old maid, and walked out in a haze of uncertainty—a mother to be—she has wondered how she would feel, if she would be any different.
Marion cuddles her infant son closer. She gazes into his bleary blue eyes, at the cleft in his chin, and calls him by his name—Jefferson Clifford.
Our first homes are within the bodies of women.
These are the homes that precede nations
and from which nations may emerge.
Nations are born from the blood and water and babies
that emerge from between the thighs of women.
Katherine G. Sutherland, “Land of Their Graves”
WHAT ARE THE ODDS that the bagpipes that heralded Jeff’s birth would be from the same regiment—the Second Battalion, Royal Canadian Regiment—that he would support to his death thirty-six years later? The piper calling from the cenotaph, as Jeff initiated his passage into the world, was like the herald in so many myths. A figure or divine sign summons heroes to their destiny: a burning bush startled young Moses so God could invoke him to lead the Israelites from Egypt; a blaze of light and unseen voices told fourteen-year-old Joan of Arc that she was to be the saviour of France. Just as the bagpipes harbingered Jeff’s birth and his destiny on 11-11-70, they would also accompany the ceremonies that honoured his death and his return to the earth on 17-07-07. “The herald’s summons may be to live,” Joseph Campbell writes, “or at a later moment of the biography, to die.” Every year on Jeff’s birthday, Remembrance Day, the pipes resound at cenotaphs around the world and at his gravesite overlooking the sea.
Their wild notes also evoke the days of clan warfare in the Scottish Highlands where our family has deep ancestral roots. The chieftain’s hereditary piper rallied the troops with his piob mhor—the great Highland bagpipe. He sounded the clan song, led the men onto the battlefield and played for as long as he could stand. The pipes’ penetrating wail carried for miles, rising above the roar of the battle. During the Highland uprisings of the 1700s, the kilted northern “savages” with their Gaelic war songs so cowed the English troops that the British government classified the bagpipes as an instrument of war. A set of pipes attached to a sheep’s stomach became such a powerful symbol of Scottish cultural integrity and resistance that for over forty years playing the bagpipes or wearing “the plaid” was a punishable crime. The 1747 Act of Proscription decreed six months’ imprisonment for the first offence; for the second, exile—to any of His Majesty’s plantations beyond the Seas.
Highlanders integrated into the British Empire’s Scottish regiments—the Scots Guards and the Black Watch—and brought their pipes with them. Jeff’s more recent forefathers also rallied to the bagpipes during the First and Second World Wars as pipers continued the tradition of leading troops into combat. Jeff’s maternal and paternal grandfathers, his great-grandfathers and great-uncles all marched to the pipes and drums of “The Highland Laddie,” the regimental march-past of the Cape Breton Highlanders:
On his head a bonnet blue
Bonnie laddie, Hielan’ laddie
Tartan plaid and Hielan’ trews
Bonnie laddie, Hielan’ laddie.
Jeff himself hearkened to their call during pre-deployment training exercises at CFB Wainwright, Alberta. “Scotland the Brave” roused the troops on the Canadian prairie for the coming mission in a land as remote, desolate and feudal as the Scottish Highlands three centuries ago. And since the bagpipes also have a lengthy history of escorting fallen warriors to their graves, Jeff heard their laments in the Afghan desert; a lone piper knelling “Amazing Grace” as his comrades’ flag-draped caskets traversed the Kandahar Airfield. The opening line—Amazing grace, how sweet the sound—now seems bitterly ironic, a refrain synonymous with loss and suffering.
I HAD ALWAYS SENSED that the day of my nephew’s birth—Remembrance Day—was a sign: this first child of our family’s next generation proclaimed “in remembrance” of our father. Jefferson Clifford carried on my father’s spirit as well as his name. His birth meant rebirth and continuance: phoenix-like, new life emerged out of the ashes. That Jeff would develop into a man so much like my father—in his reticent personality and gentle demeanour—was yet to be seen. In a 1996 letter, Jeff’s grandmother wrote to him, “You are my little Clifford—your Grandfather Murray is so much closer to all of us because we have you. You brought so many happy times to me back then when I needed so much. You are so much like your Grandfather Clifford in your ways and looks, and I’m so proud you’re like him.”
Now, in light of Jeff’s calling and the cause for which he died, his birth date resonates with numinous undertones. Born on the day that honours the wartime sacrifices of soldiers and civilians, he is one of those soldiers now remembered on this day for his sacrificial death. Moreover, November 11 is St. Martin’s Day, the feast day of the patron saint of soldiers. A fourth-century martyr, Martin was born in what is now Hungary. He was named after Mars, the Roman god of war, but was reluctant to become a soldier like his father. At the age of ten, Martin secretly attended the local Christian church, a new sect that his parents distrusted. He longed to become a Christian monk, but was forced to join the army when he was fifteen. It was while he was a soldier, however, that Martin experienced the vision that would become his defining legend.
One frosty November day, eighteen-year-old Martin was on garrison duty in Amiens, France. Dressed in his officer’s armour and a white lamb’s-wool cloak, he was riding through the crowded city gates when he noticed a beggar in rags, trembling from the cold. Martin reined in his horse and removed his cloak. He slashed it in two with his sword and handed half of it to the beggar. Heading back to barracks that afternoon, Martin came upon another beggar shivering by the roadside. Again, he stopped, took off the remaining half of his cloak, and offered it to the man. As Marti
n resumed his journey, facing a long ride in freezing temperatures, the sun burst through the grey snow clouds and the frost began to melt.
That night, Martin dreamed he saw Jesus wearing half of his lamb’s-wool cloak. “Here is Martin, the Roman soldier who has clad me,” Jesus said to the angels encircling him. This dream set the course for Martin’s life of piety. He was soon baptized. Eventually he became Bishop of the Abbey of Tours in France. Martin performed many miracles throughout his long life, but it was his humility and benevolence that made him legendary. He was buried, at his request, in the cemetery of the poor on November 11. The phenomenon of a sunny break on a gloomy November 11 is still called Verao do Sao Martino, Portuguese for “St. Martin’s Summer.”
That the patron saint of soldiers is a man celebrated for his compassion and humbleness belies the soldier stereotypes in popular culture—the macho GI Joe, Rambo or Arnold Schwarzenegger characters who glorify violence and killing as a legitimate means to an end. Real-life soldiers are often propelled by the altruism embodied in their patron saint, motivated by love more than hate—love of country, of humankind, of freedom. St. Martin personifies the humanitarian ethics that guide many soldiers—the ideals that would one day inspire the baby born on his Feast Day in 1970.
THE CONSTELLATION OF SCORPIO glows on the ceiling of Jeff’s bedroom. As I lay in his bed the night after his death gazing up at those stars, I wondered why he needed to put them up there. Why did he place that star above his mother’s head in the kitchen? In one of those stars I shall be living. Many philosophers have speculated about the connection of heavenly bodies to an individual’s destiny. “Every human being has his star,” wrote the Austrian anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner, “which determines what he works on between death and a new birth, and he comes from the particular direction of a particular star.”
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