I have come to believe that hell isn't the place depicted in old medieval paintings where the eternally damned toil in fiery caves. No, I'm starting to think it's a time.
I think hell, or at least some branch of it, is a time when there's no one left alive who ever knew you lived; that moment when even the people who have long forgotten you have passed away. When no one recognizes your photograph, or your letters, or even your name. Oblivion.
So finding Graham Parsons a few months ago was like saving a lost soul from oblivion. Or rescuing a ghost. It was bringing the existence of this long-forgotten soldier of the First World War back into the world of memory, family and grief.
I know virtually nothing of this man, yet I know more than anyone else alive. Born in 1894 to Henry and Caroline Parsons of Victoria, Graham was the younger brother of my grandfather, Frank Parsons, who died in 1966 at the comparatively ripe age of 72. Graham however would not enjoy the full life or the descendants given to his brother Frank. He died Oct. 26, 1918, just 16 days before the Armistice that ended the First World War. And until a few months ago, I had never heard this man's name, nor knew my long-dead grandfather had a brother.
Finding Graham was one part genealogy, one part archaeology, and two parts available storage. Like other men my age, my house has become the final depository for the contents of my mother's home, which was the resting place for her parents' papers and possessions. Fortunately for me (and, I suppose, for Graham), my grandparents kept their parents' papers, letters and photographs in a metal strongbox, which I now store, and a man dead for 82 years has suddenly come to life in words and pictures.
There he is playing with a dog in front of their house on Pembroke Street in a photograph taken around 1899. He sits next to his brother and his parents 101 years ago when he was 6 and Frank was 8 -- virtually the same ages my kids are now, separated by the entire 20th Century.
The practice of sending postcards in those days must have been the turn-of-the-century equivalent of telephone calls. There's an album in the strongbox with perhaps 100 perfectly preserved postcards showing miscellaneous everyday correspondence between members of the Parsons clan. Relatives from Newfoundland regularly write to Graham and tell him to behave, or wish him a Merry Christmas, or comment about the fortunes of other family members still left in Harbour Grace and Bear's Cove. In one card, postmarked April, 1907, he proudly declares during a trip on his father's tugboat that he can "steer Papa's boat now" and tells his mother he was leaving New Westminster for another port. "Papa sends his love," he says, and closes with "your loving son Graham." It was written 93 years ago, no more than 10 blocks from where I now live; the pencilled words so fresh on the card, they could have been written yesterday.
As a boy, he looks and sounds like any other boy, probably not that much different than my own son. As a young adult, he was probably not that much different from me. He wanted to captain a ship like his father did, and judging from a couple of postcards, there was the potential for marriage and a family. But none of that was to be. The First World War broke out and towards the end of it, he was shipped overseas, becoming a member of the Canadian First Infantry Battalion, British Columbia Regiment.
There is some awful indignity that would rob a soldier of his life 16 days before the end of the most destructive war the world had then known. But fate and fortune work in strange ways. He didn't die in the trenches or in some historically significant battle immortalized by statues. He died in that other great catastrophe of the early 20th century: the influenza epidemic of 1918-1919. It killed as indiscriminately as the machine guns of Belgium and France, and it killed him in Wales, where he was stationed, or mobilized, or where he ended up when they didn't know what to do with the hundreds of thousands of flu victims that started dying towards the end of the war. There would be 20 million other victims within two years, and it would kill more people than the Great War.
By the crackling fragility of the paper, a booklet in the strongbox appeared not to have been opened for 70 years; it being the Official Directory listing the location of my great uncle's grave. He lies in Bodelwydded Churchyard in St. Asaph, North Wales, with 81 other Canadians who, the directory states, "died in the repatriation camp at Kimmel Park in 1918, largely from influenza." On the page identifying the grave's location was a small letter from the King giving his condolences to my great-grandmother for her son's bravery, the King's signature mechanically reproduced on the page like a sweepstakes invitation. They must have printed a million of these, all with the same words and all with the same signature.
Graham's parents never visited the grave of their son, Wales being as inaccessible to a family of modest means as the moon. Perfect strangers corresponded with my great-grandparents for a time, telling them as late as 1923 that they would leave some holly at the grave that Christmas. But even that correspondence ended, and it's probably been 77 years since any holly was left at his grave.
My 69-year-old mother, now remembering fragments of her father's stories, told me that Henry and Caroline Parsons never recovered from the loss of their son and were dead themselves within 10 years of Graham's death.
But how do you ever recover from that kind of loss?
On the only photograph I have of him as an adult, I read his mother's shaking handwriting on the back: "my poor Dear Graham" and, for an instant, I am with her in her grief, and at the same moment studying my own children and praying that there is no war or plague or other catastrophe to take them from me as Graham was taken from her.
The very movement of the pencil on the back of the photograph reveals the unspeakable grief she endured of losing a child: the one thing that we as parents, in any century, fear more than even our own deaths.
Eighty-two years after the end of the First World War, it's easy to look upon its casualties a continent away as so many forgotten names on so many crosses, but discovering Graham Parsons has reminded me that for every war grave, there was a person with his own history: a person who loved and was loved.
A person with dreams and ambitions.
A person with a mother and father whose lives were shattered by their child's death.
And surely that is worth remembering this Remembrance Day.
Tony Wilson lives in Vancouver.