Frank was an older gentleman, kind and sweet.We were all telling stories one day and Frank revealed a massive scar on his back from a surgery when he was a boy. It turns out that Frank was a patient at Tranquille, the tuberculosis sanatorium located just outside of Kamloops.This piqued my interest because I had heard of Tranquille through my own family stories.
"You didn't happen to know a woman named Elizabeth or Betty, did you?" I asked Frank, thinking it was a long shot.
As it happened, he did.Frank was older than my grandmother but he remembered her and knew her as "Liz."
He could describe her without being prompted and confessed to me that he had a bit of a crush on her at the time.
When Frank was in the sanatorium, he was young, around 12 years old and my grandmother was around 19 years old.
I was thinking of this because it's Remembrance Day tomorrow and I was thinking about the people that I knew in my life who were either in the war or affected by it. I remembered Frank and his brief connection to my grandmother who passed away from cancer before I was born.
When my grandmother was in Tranquille, my grandfather (who served in the Second World War) used to write her letters and we still have those letters from when they were courting.
This is a tenuous connection to the war but it's all that I have.
With both of my maternal grandparents gone before I was born, it seems a small victory to be able to meet someone like Frank who, for a brief moment, was a part of their lives in a way that I could never be.
But by knowing Frank, I am also a part of that story now.
The connections that people make throughout their lives are the single most breathtaking thing about life.The threads of your story are woven beside your neighbours (or your friends' roommate) creating the most beautiful tapestry of us, here, altogether.
