'The Children's Crusade'

In 1212, by several medieval chronicles, an extraordinary event occurred in Europe. A shepherd boy named Stephen gathered thousands of young people in France — most of them children and adolescents — and led them toward the sea, believing it would part for them as the Red Sea had parted for Moses. It didn’t. The ships offered to carry them turned out to be slave ships. Some were sold in North Africa. Some returned, aged, decades later. Most did not.

Kurt Vonnegut subtitled Slaughterhouse-Five “The Children’s Crusade” because, he said, that is what every war is: a crusade of children, sent by adults who will not go themselves, to die for causes the children didn’t create and couldn’t change. The memorial always comes after. The beauty always comes after. The making of something lasting from what was lost always comes after. This is the only power that survives the thing that couldn’t be stopped.

What we carry of them is the only permanence they have. The keeping of the memory is not sentiment. It is the final act of protection available to the ones who stayed.

This is for the woman who tends the memory of things the world moved on from too quickly.