What do you think about during the minutes silence?

[NCTDN]

I mean, honestly. I stood there thinking 'what should I be thinking about? I know I'll ask mn'.
But should I actually be thinking about something specific?

Thank you for understanding @ThePolishWombat. I made the mistake years ago of telling DC that I would never stand in the way of them dfoing anything they wanted in their lives except joining the army. I think that made him interested Adores CCF, spends most of his free time doing cadet stuff. At the moment he has something else in mind but has already said, 'If this doesn't work out I'm joining the army' and he means it.

I think of the lost lives (both actual and in terms of life changing injury). The remaining veterans from WW2 would have been a similar age that my DSs are now.

@afternoonspray I totally understand that feeling now that I’m a mum myself.
I always say to DH, that yes I worry about him when he’s deployed, but if that was my child it would be a whole other world of worry

afternoonspray that worries me too. DH and his brothers were all soldiers and DS was in the ACF, totally committed to it and becoming the leader of his platoon. When DH died I half expected him to come home telling me he had signed up. Hopefully he has instead obeyed DH's wish that he do 'anything but army' and has found himself a job he quite likes. If anything happens with the job, I suspect I will be on eggshells again.

I try and compose myself by thinking of the mundane - I'm not given to teariness at all but I'm always dangerously on the edge at remembrance for some reason (both grandfathers fought but I have no other connection)
Though yesterday the pompous little man who played the Last Post was appalling - I had to avoid DS's eye as it would have been the least appropriate place ever to laugh

This year I was stood in a pasty shop struck by the sheer horror and loss of life incurred by war. That was interspersed with wondering why the woman next to me was so intent on finding the perfect sandwich and packet of crisps while the rest of us in there were stood like zombies. But I guess she is entitled to do what she likes.

Yesterday was my DS's first Remembrance parade as an air cadet. One of the other parents cheerfully told me as they were setting off that they get at least one person fainting most years. We followed the parade but got stuck in the crowd and ended up round the corner from him out of sight, and I spent most of the two minutes thinking 'Please don't faint. God I hope he doesn't faint. I can't see him. What will they do if he faints? He hasn't got his phone. Please don't faint. God, I hope I don't faint.' He was absolutely fine though - this year's fainter was a sea cadet. I was very annoyed by the bloke who walked past it all talking loudly on his phone though.

I'm not very good about thinking the right things during the two minutes but on the day I think about the people who died and how when I was a child they seemed like grown men but now I have a 12 year old son I can see that most were boys.and how the thought of my son going to war in five or so years time would terrify me, and they no doubt felt the same.

Most years I just say a Lord’s Prayer in my head and think of those who have fallen or been wounded defending our country.

This year I just looked at my newborn in his post-feed coma and thought of how lucky I am to have him and how proud I am to have named him after my beloved late Grandpa who served in WWII.

Then I cried.

I think of my Dad who was 19 and already serving in the RN when WW2 started. He served on the Arctic Convoys and landed troops on D-Day, where he was subsequently sunk. I think about all of his shipmates who didn't make it that day and are at the bottom of the sea just off Juno beach. I think about visiting there with my Dad fifty years later, and him making his peace with it. I think that Remembrance Day is about showing respect for the dead, regardless of your feelings about the conflicts themselves.

Well this is uncomfortable, I hope I dont sneeze/laugh/fart
Shut up and think about the soldiers

This

Honestly I'm usually playing a game of "guess when the minute is up"

Though yesterday the pompous little man who played the Last Post was appalling

Oh my god, I was at the Tower of London on Sunday and could hear someone playing the Last Post and it was awful!! It was so out of tune. My mother and I were very much making this face.

My grandmother - she told us all she was a typist and we’ve only recently found out she actually worked in Intelligence. We don’t know much about it still, but lots of things I had considered her little quirks - she would never drive the same route to place and back - and she never wrote down information or shopping lists or phone numbers, always used mnemonics to remember things, she could remember in huge detail what any person had been wearing or what they had said, months and even years after. She used to look after us when I was little and people often remark on the way I remember things and do things, and now I realise that must be her and her training.

I think of some headstones that we saw in Thailand, near the River Kwai. They said “A soldier known only unto God” To have a child, then have them snatched from you in their teens and to live the rest of your life never knowing where they lay must be devastating. Also with husbands and wives obviously, but I can’t forget those parents who had a child one minute, and not the next.

I think about all the people who died during the wars.
Especially the soldiers who died in the trenches.

The lives destroyed by the war, either by death, or the toll of physical and mental injuries and the shadows that they still leave on society.

For my Great Granddad who came back a broken and damaged man and died 20 odd years later as a result of his war experiences.

For my Great, great uncle who never met the niece he was so proud of before he went to the far east. When my great grandma died, a letter turned up in her possessions, and he and his friend had a pact that if only one of them came home they would write to their friend's family. The contents were heartbreaking. The sheer pointless, torturous suffering that humans have inflicted on eachother. My grandma and I sobbed together for the relative we never knew.

The hope that we remember and each generation continues to remember and prevent such senseless carnage happening again. I know we have had other wars since, with very debatable degrees of purpose, but please to never let such swathes of the world repeat history again.

Plus fleeting thoughts creeping in and being dismissed. The robin hopping to a low branch by the memorial was very sweet.

My friend's brother and his best friend (mentioned in another thread)

How everything those men fought for in the two world wars is going to shit with the rise of the far right.

Then I usually have a moment of being very angry and upset by the futility of the whole lot of it.

Then I try to regain a bit of composure before the time is up, sometimes unsuccessfully.

Oh dear. My phone is not on silent. What if it rings during the silence. Gets phone out and manage to set it to vibrate only - involves several app presses. Puts phone away and the silence is over. Whoops!

I think of my nan. She was only a child during WW2, but lived in London during the blitz. She would describe how she would stand on the balcony of their council flat watching the bombs drop and when the air raid sirens went off, she and her siblings would hide under the dining table. They must have been terrified. Her eldest brother was fatally shot by a German sniper whilst crossing a bridge in 1945. In the 1990s, my mum made contact with the MOD and we found out that he'd been buried in a war cemetery in Dusseldorf. We took my nan over there and she stood at his graveside and cried like a baby, even all those years later.

To all the veterans on this thread, thank you for your service.

How I hate war.
My grandpa who survived WW1 but was never properly well afterwards
My parents and their lives in WW2 and how to find out more about it.
My friend whose son was killed in Iraq.

I think about my grandad in WWI, all the people that gave their lives for us and also specifically about my brother and what he went through serving in NI during the troubles and how it's affected him.

I spend the whole time trying to not cry telling myself not to cry. I have always found people showing respect really hard I end up crying my eyes out. Even when I see it on tv.

I think about my great uncle Sam who went to the East somewhere and never came home. Imagine a young lad of 21 who had never so much as been on a plane before being sent thousands of miles away to die in a jungle. I then think about his mother and my gran and how awful it must've been to have not known what happened to him. As it turns out a few years before my nana died we received a letter from a son of a fellow soldier whose dad's diary described how Sam died. It was an accident and would have been quick... that gave my nana a lot of comfort as for years she'd imagined him dying slowly in the jungle surrounded by enemies.

Anyway...I think about Sam.

I pray, I pray for everyone who has lost people and those effected by war and that they are given the respect and support that they need, that the world will become kinder and conflict will decrease. I pray for my family and extended family. I pray for healing for those who have been hurt.

I think of all the boys who didn't come home and then I think of my own boy who didn't come home and then I cry for me and for every bereaved mother everywhere