A proper ponder on a Saturday. How on earth to link up two different subjects into a blog that makes sense.
Nobody ever tells prospective parents that becoming a parent strips off a few layers of skin that will never grow back. This loss of metaphorical dermis makes your eyes well up more easily, and sadness comes a little more readily because suddenly being a parent/grandparent/care-giver makes risk and loss more relatable.
This ponder doesn’t come from nowhere. In 1987 on the 6th of June my local towns of Shoreham-by- Sea and Worthing were full, as they always were around this date, of Canadian D-Day Veterans. Revisiting their training areas for the planned assault on Juno Beach in 1944.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juno_Beach
But in 1987 I had a 7 month old baby. As if from nowhere my empathy for the Canadians heroism and loss filled me with sorrow and melancholy. Their smooth balding heads under their regimetal berets were an acute reminder of the vulnerable head of my small son.
That feeling has never left me and I am much more sensitive to these things than I ever was before. But Thursday, watching the Commemoration of 80 years since D-Day seemed like a double layer of loss. There are those who never left those beaches 80 years ago. And those who survived to tell the tales, filling hotels and bars in Sussex with lively chatter, while they were in their fifties and sixties. Proudly wearing their regimental blazers and berets remembering their lost comrades but also revelling in being alive and being able to visit their old haunts with their fellow survivors. Most of those vibrant men are themselves now deceased. The links in this blog are a useful read and explain better than I can why Sussex was so special to them.
The Juno Beach Centre
I will always struggle when I see a bald head, a blazer and a beret. Being a parent has indelibly changed me. The two are linked, tenuously, I agree but linked never the less.
theoldmortuary.design 
I watched it as well, and it was incredibly moving. I cried through most of it, seeing the men, and thinking of those who did not survive, and the sacrifice of all of them. it was intense and I can understand you connecting it to a vulnerable person , even it if was a baby
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A hard watch, I agree. They were all so young.
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I also failed to mention all those soldiers and airman who had travelled to Britain to train, always in idyllically beautiful places and then died during an exercise. Throughput my life these secrets of the war years have been revealed and memorials set in place. Stopping off places for visiting veterans who will very soon stop coming altogether.
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yes, all so very sad –
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