Sad Day in Canada

[Lisa]

Mayerthorpe Memorial Park

A memorial garden was opened today to honor the four slain mounties that died in 2005.

I love this quote:

We cannot grieve forever. It's not the way people are designed. You have to reach a certain point with your grieving where you turn then to the beauty around you, the goodness around you, and that's what this is all about, Margaret Thibault, the society's founding president, told CBC News.

 

[exile]

Mayerthorpe Memorial Park

A memorial garden was opened today to honor the four slain mounties that died in 2005.

As the great monument in St. Petersburg, commemorating the dead of the Siege of Leningrad says:

Let no one forget!
Let nothing be forgetten!

You can't grieve forever (although I suspect we do, at some level) but it is unthinkable that we should ever forget...

 

[Gordon Nore]

Thanks for posting this, Lisa. I heard some of the story on the radio today. It looks like a great deal of thought went into this memorial park. I was quite moved by the description of the statues of the four constables:

Myrol, is shown standing at ease, facing his hometown of Red Deer; Johnston faces north toward his hometown of Lac La Biche, Alta.; Gordon faces west toward his first detachment; and Schiemann, the most senior of the four, is shown at attention, saluting while facing east toward his hometown of Stony Plain, Alta...

Sculptors Don and Shirley Begg consulted closely with each constable's family, especially their mothers, to ensure the statues were as lifelike as possible.


"You know how a mother strokes her child's head? Mothers know what the hairline on the back of their son's head looks like. They wanted them lifelike and accurate," said Shirley Begg.

 

[arnisador]

hat sounds like a nice tribute. I'm glad to hear it.

 

[Kacey]

The Jews say, about the Holocaust, "Never to forgive, never to forget" - not because they do not forgive, but because a wrong, once forgiven, might be forgotten, and once forgotten, might be repeated. This sounds like a similar situation... so I hope no one ever forgets, and therefore that it never happens again.

 

[exile]

The Jews say, about the Holocaust, "Never to forgive, never to forget" - not because they do not forgive, but because a wrong, once forgiven, might be forgotten, and once forgotten, might be repeated. This sounds like a similar situation... so I hope no one ever forgets, and therefore that it never happens again.

Yes—memory is crucial. It fixes the reality of what happened. Otherwise, after horrifying experiences which happened to one generation, another generation, which had forgotten the realities of the past, might well be tempted to repeat the same fatal errors. On a much more local scale, people take for granted the lives of those in their communities who take great risks to ensure that the rest are protected. And they should never be taken for granted. Episodes like this make clear just how much we demand of our guardians—that they will put themselves in harm's way to this extent. The least we can do is make sure that no one forgets them, when things go this horribly wrong.

 

[Tames D]

I missed this thread when it came out in 2005. I just want to say I remember seeing this story on the news and it was a sad day for us here in the States as well.