every inch a sailor
I don't know much about the
merchant marines who served Canada in WW II. I remember hearing that
they were denied recognition and benefits for decades after the war. I didn't pay a bunch of old and dead sailors any mind.
My dad was a corporal in the regular armed forces, a handsome young man to judge from old family photographs. He married my mum after the war, she left her job, and they settled down and raised a family. That was the story I knew through my childhood and adolescence.
Years afterward, my father called out a name my sister heard when he was recovering from one of his surgeries. The story came out over the following days, explaining the conservative woolen suit my mother had been married in: it hadn't been the first marriage for either of them. My father's first bride had decided to return to England and my mother's first husband had been a merchant marine lost at sea. I saw her amended birth certificate once, with that unfamiliar surname.
Years later, when I heard about the facility, I tried
looking up that sailor's name (Jack something) on the Veterans' Affairs web site. No results. His name is on no Google search result page.
Jack was an immigrant to Canada. He served on a ship in the Atlantic. I think he was loved. He was lost at sea. That's pretty much all I know.
Tomorrow (now in some parts of the world) is
Remembrance Day. I wonder how I can remember something I have never known.