Next Monday is Remembrance Day, and like every year, a service will be held at the war memorial in Riverside Park but as a retired army chaplain says, it’s more than a memorial.

Afghanistan veteran Reverend Jim Short, was on the NL Morning News and explained the origins of war memorials in Canada. “We sometimes use the term ‘war memorials’ for those places in our towns, but you know they’re not really war memorials, they’re cenotaphs, the term which means an empty tomb.”

“So they put these memorials up all across Canada so they could have a place to go because they couldn’t go to the graves of their sons and daughters.”

The retired minister looked back to the original Remembrance Day exactly one year after the end of the Great War. “If we went back to 1919, all across Canada, it wasn’t a celebration.”

“It was the big funeral that nobody had. So, sixty thousand Canadians died in the First World War, their bodies were never found, or they were buried overseas, that’s like sixty thousand families and friends who never had a funeral.”

Short said what Remembrance Day means to him. “At the heart of it for me is, throughout the twenty first century, there’s all kinds of families and they’re still with us and younger veterans, I mean there’s lots of veterans are twenty, thirty and forty years of age who on this day, we think about who we lost, and so it’s a grieving day for me.”

Services at the Riverside Park Cenotaph begin at 10:45 Monday morning.

Photo courtesy: Delta Optimist