The meaning of Remembrance Day in a Photograph

When I was a kid one of my favorite things in life was to sit down with my grandmother and go through her old photos. She’d tell me who everyone was in each faded black and white snapshot, from neighborhood friends when she was a child herself, to family members, to a cat named Minnie that belonged to her mother.

But there’s one photo in the bunch that I always had a special affinity for, and ironically, it’s not even a portrait of anyone in my own family lineage. It’s a black and white portrait of a wide-eyed young man dressed in an army uniform from the Second World War.

I remember at some point asking my grandmother who he was and she told me he his name was Jay and that he had been a family friend who had died during the war. I’m sure she told me what his last name was but, sadly, I have no recollection of what it might have been.

On the back of the photograph is an inscription that Jay himself wrote. It reads, “Well folks, How do you like this. It sure isn’t a masterpiece from an art gallery: Jay.”

Maybe it was the self-deprecation in his note that spoke to me as a child. Or maybe it had to do with the combination of stoicism and determination in his young, heroic face. Or maybe it was a fleeting awareness that in my life of privilege I was looking at a portrait of a young person who had fought and died for a freedom that I was an inheritor of.

We are so lucky to be free and to live in a safe, democratic part of the world. On Remembrance Day it is both humbling and an honor to take the time to think about all the souls in the armed forces, past and present, who have made sacrifices so that we might know what freedom is.

Lest we forget.