Where Have all the Poppies Gone?

Where have all the poppies gone? I’ve calculated that I’ve personally lost over a hundred Remembrance Day poppies during my lifetime. It’s a ritual with me. I buy it, I pin it on, and I lose it. This generally takes less than twenty minutes. It doesn’t matter how carefully I pin it on, or how many times I weave the pin back and forth through my lapel – I still lose it. I don’t think that I’m particularly unique. My husband loses several each year, as do the kids, and pretty much everyone else who’s ever proudly pinned on a poppy. I’m happy to buy a second poppy, but it makes me feel careless to lose them. So here is my question. Where are those lost poppies? In all my years of poppy wearing, I have never once seen one lying on the floor or the ground - so just where is it that they go?

Remembrance Day poppies are hugely important to me. I’ve bought at least one every year since kindergarten, when I was sent to school clutching my dime in my sweaty little fist. Lest you think my mother was a Scrooge, that was back in 1960. Ten cents was a big enough sum to entrust to a five-year-old. By grade four it became a quarter, and I knew enough not to squander it in any of the four candy-laden “corner stores” that I had to pass on my way to school. It was such a temptation! Twenty-five cents would have bought enough gum to unhinge my jaw like a python swallowing a turkey.

There was always a solemn hush at school on Remembrance Day back then. Our artwork featuring red poppies and stark white crosses filled the bulletin boards. Hymns such as Abide With Me had been committed to memory. It still wasn’t that long after WWII had ended, and many of our dads and even a few of our moms were veterans. People still remembered the turmoil and upheaval and sacrifice in a very real way. Those of us who didn't live through WWII could only experience it in a secondary way, through the memories of others. And even though I was born years after the war ended, the ripples of what had taken place still reached out to touch me. The war didn’t play out on TV back then. It had taken place in real time, and all families had been affected by the limitations of living in a wartime country, with its shortages of goods, its worries, and its heart-wrenching losses.

Remembrance Day was, and still is, a time to remember that a shocking number of men and women have died or were wounded fighting for something that was greater than their individual selves. The principles of a country were at stake; the right to live our lives as we choose was threatened. I felt the undeniable importance of what had taken place during those years before I was born, and I felt it in a personal way. Buying a poppy was a small way that I could contribute.

As I sat there at school in my little wooden desk with its scratched and re-varnished surface and its nifty but useless inkwell, I felt that somehow I was contributing to something far beyond any borders I could imagine. The weight of history pressed down on me as I dropped my quarter into the snow white box and received my poppy. I could see that it was not only a beautiful flower, but that is was also a symbol of shed blood, with a black centre where those had made “the ultimate sacrifice” forever lived.

So where do those poppies that leap off our lapels go? Are they simply falling on the ground, or have they gone to join those they represent? Perhaps it is their destiny to leave us as abruptly as the soldiers they signify. But it is also their destiny to help us remember that what we enjoy today came at the expense of others. I feel a duty to my dad to preserve those secondary memories I have of the War, and to observe the solemnity of the occasion, and to think of all those young lives that were ended too soon. Today, there are once again fallen or injured soldiers in the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq and in many places through-out the world. Remembrance Day is more important than ever. And I wonder, are we re-learning the bitter lessons of our fathers?