18 July, 1929 - 25 July, 2024
Preached at Trinity Church, Anglican Diocese of Toronto, 23 August, 2024
Every passing and every funeral is sad, for as the poet John Donne said, none of us are islands, and every one’s death diminishes us in some way. At the same time, the funeral of one advanced in years is an opportunity to reflect on how the fortunate are blessed with long lives, with accomplishments, and with many of the satisfactions that life affords. So it is with us today as give thanks for the life of Jim Henderson, and as we remember and recall some of the details of Jim’s life, as you have already heard it described.
Today I’d like you to reflect with me briefly on the importance of remembering a life, even as we are faced with the fragility of memory itself. Jim’s life was worth remembering, for he was many things: a soldier, a teacher, a journalist, a father, grandfather, and great-grandfather. He was blessed twice to be a loving husband.
My abiding memory of Jim will always be over dinner one night when he told me the story of the Canoe River train disaster. In November 1950, Jim was aboard a troop train taking men of the 2nd Regiment, Royal Canadian Horse Artillery, from Shilo, Manitoba, to Fort Lewis, Washington, where they would train before proceeding to Korea. That train collided with an eastbound train in a remote part of the Canadian Rockies, with many killed and more badly injured.
Jim told me the story of how he and his comrades spent long, cold hours tending the wounded and dying before help finally arrived. He spared me the details, but he told me the story because he knew that I was a soldier and was interested in military history.
Story telling is an important part of military culture. Stories traded in the mess help keep a unit’s identity and culture alive. Young soldiers, if they are wise, listen to the stories of veterans and learn from them. Most of Jim’s stories were funny, and I commend his little book of military stories to you if you are fortunate enough to find a copy. But that night Jim’s story of Canoe River was a soldier’s lesson in the fragility of life and of the bonds of comradeship in desperate moments.
Stories form memory, and memories form history, and but memory is fragile and history is not always remembered. One historian has called Korea “Canada’s forgotten war”, which is why the words we say on Remembrance Day, “lest we forget”, are so important. The stories of our veterans shape who we are as a people, as Canadians, and if we forget them, we lose a part of our identity. This is why its important for us to remember the stories of our veterans even after they themselves are unable to tell them. Jim’s memories and stories slipped away from him in old age, when, as his obituary puts it, “he endured a long struggle with frailty and with dementia”. Today we promise Jim that we will remember him, and that we will remember for him.
They say that old soldiers never die, they only fade away. As we live longer and as we ourselves move into old age, we see friends and family whose memories and identities slowly fade away. Perhaps we fear that fate for ourselves. So today, one of the consolations of the Christian faith that we turn to is the perfect memory of God.
Scripture assures us that we are known to God even we no longer know ourselves. The psalmist says that “you {Lord] have searched me and known me. / You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away” (Ps 139:1-2). Likewise we hear elsewhere in the psalms that God “has compassion for those who fear him. For he knows how we were made; he remembers that we are dust” (Ps 103.13). Our faith includes the promise that in the eternal mind of God, we are remembered and never forgotten. The man crucified alongside our Lord seems to sense this when he asks Jesus to “remember me, when you have come into your kingdom” (Lk 23:42).
Today we commend Jim into the eternal care of God, and we fix our hope on the promise that God will remember us when we ourselves may forget and one day be forgotten. The Christian promise of the resurrection assures us that we will be remembered, raised, and reformed on that day when death and dementia are abolished. Today we commend Jim to God, trusting that nothing good about his life will be forgotten in the eternal mind of God, until that day when we are reunited with Jim and all those we love who have gone before us.
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