Sarah Keller, a veteran and widow, is part of a new generation grieving war dead: ‘His name will be spoken again’ (2024)

The last time Sarah Keller saw her husband Bryce, she remembers the blue shirt and jeans he wore, and the look on his face before he went through airport security, a look that to her mind said, “I love you and I don’t want to go but I need to get back.”

Sarah Keller, 44, is not a military widow in the traditional mould. She saw action just as her late husband Bryce Keller did, and sooner in her career as a soldier. She had been to the place where he died in battle aged 27 in 2006, the White School in southern Afghanistan, where he earned a posthumous Medal of Military Valour for saving other Canadians’ lives.

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So Sarah’s experience of remembering Bryce these last 18 years — a soldier mourning a soldier as a wife grieves a husband — is a unique personal story with relevance for the national soul.

The Great War and the Second World War dominate the Canadian imagination on Remembrance Day. Much of the poetry, ritual, and music are fully a century old. So are the veterans of those wars, all of them rightly revered but somehow distant from the present day, like survivors of history. It can be striking on this day to recall that there are also fallen soldiers who grew up with email and Star Wars, and whose combat deaths trouble the living memory of young Canadians, soldiers and civilians alike. Sometimes it takes extra effort.

So for Sarah Keller, as for Canada itself, remembrance is deliberate memory. It is purposeful, formal, but fragile, an acknowledgment of memory’s fickle weakness on its own. Remembrance is an effort, motivated by love and duty, to cultivate memory and hold back the tide of forgetting, whether it is a century later or just a few years.

After the airport drop off, the next time Sarah was with Bryce was at the ramp ceremony for his casket at the air base in Trenton, Ont., for the start of journey to the coroner’s office in Toronto along the route that would later be named the Highway of Heroes. Unusually, she was a grieving spouse in full uniform, probably the first since Korea, and the ranking officer seemed momentarily stumped about whether and where to pin Bryce’s Memorial Cross on her. She was part of a new generation of Canadians grieving war dead.

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Sarah grew up with her parents and older brother in Edmonton and Fort McMurray and settled finally in Sherwood Park, an Edmonton bedroom community. Her family loved music and she was raised on M*A*S*H, which left her wanting to be an army nurse who was also a rock-and-roll lead singer.

A recruiter at her high school was scouting for officer candidates to attend Royal Military College in Kingston, Ont. Her grades weren’t up to that level, but it put the idea in her mind. So she “snuck down to the recruiting centre with a bus ticket and bright eyes and dreams.”

Her mother, who worked in occupational and environmental health at the University of Alberta, was anti-war in the spirit of the times, influenced by the Vietnam War. “The fact that her children thought about enlistment did not sit well,” Sarah said in an interview.

Her brother heeded that advice, but Sarah was overawed by “Hot Lips” Houlihan, “Hawkeye” Pierce and the mobile army surgical hospital gang in Korea. The morality of this dangerous job seemed simple and attractive, even as the show confronted military life and death, with enemy fire and plane crashes and so many wounded.

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“When you look at them from the outside you never think that’s really going to be you. That’s just the dramaticized version, and you would manage that with the same grace and poise and maturity that the people on the screen do. That that’s not going to be you,” Sarah said.

“At time you think that’s horrible, but that would never be me, that wouldn’t be anyone I’d know. You wouldn’t join if that’s the reality.”

She wanted to be a medic. Her mother would not sign the form to enlist with the regular force, but eventually gave her blessing and signature for training in communications, like “Radar” O’Reilly, as a radio teletype operator, a job that no longer exists. Sarah signed up for the reserves, later the regular force, and spent her days at CFB Edmonton, eventually training as a medical technician.

She met Bryce during a training course at CFB Kingston in the summer of 1998, not long after she contributed to relief of that winter’s great ice storm in Quebec and eastern Ontario.

A year older, Bryce had just been cleared from a chicken pox quarantine and put on her course. She can still picture him walking down to join them with three other women, charismatic and handsome.

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“I remembered it even before all of this,” she said.

She was rooming with his crush, so she knew him, but was not interested. Sarah thought, with youthful certainty, that a previous bad relationship meant she never wanted a boyfriend ever again. Bryce changed that, with his bleached blond hair like Eminem, matching her dyed bright red hair, both just barely acceptable as lifelike colours in the military dress code. First they were friends, but they were in love by the end of the summer. They got tattoos, and imagined a life in the army together.

“He was genuine, and that was novel to me at that point,” she said.

Bryce was from Regina, where he had been studying engineering. But he moved to be with her in Alberta, taking work in construction and training in carpentry. The next year he was back in Kingston for a course, and when she went there to drive him home, they got married on a hillside near the base, with a justice of the peace out of the phone book presiding, and two of her old roommates as bridesmaid witnesses.

There was a bigger family wedding party later on back home, which everyone thought was the real deal. But for them it was just a show. The registry was signed at Kingston. It was not until Bryce was dead that Sarah fessed up to her mother the truth about this, for fear some reporter would somehow dig it up.

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After they married, her career started picking up, faster than his, and she deployed to the peacekeeping mission in Bosnia in 2002. He wanted to join the infantry, but did not meet vision criteria, so they saved up and got him laser surgery, and he joined the regular force in 2004.

“You just don’t talk about the dangerous things with people outside of that realm,” Sarah said. “You just think that’s going to be us, those vets down the legion telling stories over beer.”

You never think this is the last time you’ll see someone

Bryce was training at Alberta’s Camp Wainwright when Sarah went to Afghanistan in July 2005 until February 2006. Early in the tour, she remembers being shot at while patrolling with nonchalant American soldiers who confidently reassured her, “Ah don’t worry about it, they never hit anything.” Near the end, she recovered casualties from a major suicide bombing that injured her friend, Master Cpl. Paul Franklin, who lost his legs and became a prominent veterans advocate, and killed diplomat Glyn Berry, head of the Provincial Reconstruction Team in Kandahar.

She was away from her husband for months, and he was due to leave when she came home. Their chains of command managed to co-ordinate a brief overlap, so that Sarah’s group left Afghanistan first and Bryce’s left Canada last, and they had 10 days together that February.

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“Honestly it’s one of things that’s been a little bit lost to time,” she said. “At the time, you never think this is the last time you’ll see someone.”

“All I wanted to do was go back to tour then I could at least see Bryce,” she said. “I had this idea like I know what it’s like and I can help. I just remember that I didn’t want to be home.”

“It does bother me to lose memories. That’s the greatest fear,” she said.

She remembers the last time she saw him, though. It was a few months later, in May, when she dropped him at the airport after his last brief visit home.

That’s when he gave her the look she recognized, “I love you and I don’t want to go but I need to get back.”

“When I go to my memories, it’s usually before Afghanistan time,” Sarah said. “I go back to being more naïve, before I had seen some of the things you end up seeing in those situation, and before they were tied to devastating loss.”

It was Gen. Wayne Eyre, who years later became the chief of the defence staff, who told her he was dead. She remembers the look in his eyes of “horror and ultimate sadness.” She asked her friend to get her his red sweater, a hoodie she still keeps.

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Cpl. Bryce Keller died during one of the most recognized instances of military valour and courage under fire in modern Canadian history. A patrol near the White School in Pashmul was ambushed by a large Taliban force lying in wait, dug in and heavily armed. Seven Canadians were injured and four died, including Keller, who ran through gunfire to get a machine gun to his pinned down comrades. He was killed by a rocket-propelled grenade strike.

Bryce was not religious but, as Sarah tells it, registered his faith as Roman Catholic because of advice that any religion looks better than none to the enemy in the case of capture. It meant the military would give him a Catholic funeral. But it also meant it took some effort and a conciliatory padre to get them to allow her friend to sing Blackbird by the Beatles.

As a combat death, the National Military Cemetery in Ottawa was an option for Bryce’s burial, but she chose a section of the cemetery near her home in Sherwood Park, off in a corner where you cannot see the road. She knew it would one day happen, but she is upset this year to see the trees cleared and construction starting on adjoining property, spoiling the peacefulness of the place.

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She knew it was eventually going happen, but this construction has lately kept her away from a place that is important to Bryce’s memory.

“At first I didn’t go there except for important events,” she said. “Like, how is this how I see Bryce?”

But she went all the same. “I needed a place to go. It took a while before it became a place that was familiar and unchanging enough that I didn’t feel horrified to be there.”

After Bryce’s death, Sarah rose in rank, attended nursing school at the University of Alberta, and was posted back to her old unit, 1 Field Ambulance. She retired from the military in 2020 but continues to work on the base as a civilian contractor in health care.

In time, she would go on trips and bring back mementoes, a pebble or a shell to lay on the grave, once a bright red maple leaf from Ontario, where they get redder than they do locally. Her burial plot is right next to his.

Her tradition is to make a wreath on Remembrance Day and lay it on the grave with family, including kids who have grown old enough to share in a ceremonial taste of his favourite Jack Daniel’s.

They join in reciting the Ode of Remembrance, from Laurence Binyon’s poem For the Fallen, with its famous fourth stanza: “They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: / Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. / At the going down of the sun and in the morning / We will remember them.”

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“They leave me alone for a little bit, and then we go have lunch,” she said.

Memory can be cultivated and deliberate, but it can also be unbidden, unwanted, intrusive, triggered. It can lie in wait for years. It can hurt you by surprise. Grief softens over time. Its sharp edges dull. Memory just retreats.

Some of the therapy Sarah has pursued was an effort to allow that softening to happen, to stop actively grieving, to stop constantly thinking, but also, “weirdly,” she says, to not avoid grieving.

“There’s a fear that if you’re not grieving it means you’re not missing him. I worried that people would think that,” she said.

Some of that fear centred on her relationship with Justin, her spouse, also a veteran who deployed to Bosnia and Afghanistan and is now a paramedic.

“I worried that people would think ‘Oh she’s got over it,’” she said. “The reality is there is no getting over it, there is carrying on.”

He will be there at the gravesite on Remembrance Day. “He loves me and wants me to be happy and not to be sad, but I’ve lost my spouse,” she said.

The other day Sarah got an email encouragement to wear a poppy at work. It was just like when Blackbird comes on at the supermarket or wherever, or a new Star Wars comes out, which Bryce would have loved. It all comes back into focus. Or during a terrible rainstorm earlier this year in High Prairie, on a piece of land Bryce had never seen before, when she was suddenly back with him driving through a rainstorm in Chicago on their way back home from Ontario to Alberta, a lifetime away.

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“It’s only ever just under the surface,” she said.

The first time Sarah Keller spoke to National Post, last spring, was to register a complaint.

The paper had published a piece in the series Heroes Among Us that told the story of the battle at the White School in the context of two high level awards, Stars of Military Valour, that were given to two surviving soldiers. The mention of Bryce was not dismissive or obviously disrespectful, but it was perfunctory, clipped, newsy, stripped of its human meaning. It was a factoid about some soldier, a minor detail. And it was terribly upsetting for Sarah Keller to read.

“Please don’t misunderstand,” she wrote. “I am thankful that there are people like you doing the work, researching, writing, speaking, and filming to preserve military history and to educate Canadians. While it is incredibly difficult on a personal level I have tried my best to contribute as a volunteer speaker, to that exact end; preserving history and educating. That being said, there was an almostindescribable and overwhelming wave of grief and disappointment in reading… of Bryce only as a soldier who was “lying dead just outside the building” rather than as the brave man who voluntarily took a bound with the last functional C6 in the platoon, across open ground and under heavy enemy fire, in an attempt to rescue a fellow soldier and provide additional assistance to histeam.”

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“Public attention is a blessing and a curse,” Sarah said in the more recent interview. There were intrusive reporters around the time of his death and at his funeral. But when a soldier’s death is a shared experience of a nation, there is a little comfort for his loved ones to know he will never be forgotten, Sarah said.

She thinks that, one day, someone will say her name for the last time, but not Bryce’s. Some student will do a Remembrance Day project someday. Other soldiers will hear about him. There’s a firehall at CFB Suffield named for him.

“I know his name will be spoken again,” she said.

That sort of remembrance is deliberate memory, formal but fragile, an acknowledgment of memory’s insufficiency to the task.

If memory were fair, it would not be painful, debilitating, over and over again in the same agonized imagination. If memory were fair, Sarah could listen to Blackbird or get reminded to wear a poppy like anyone else.

If memory were perfect, it would not need sustaining ritual, like pebbles at a gravesite. It would not need physical reminders that grow at the pace of a tree, like the maples and oaks she plants on the anniversary of his death, Aug. 3. Each time, she takes a picture of a little toy army guy by the new sapling and sends it to Bryce’s parents. He even looks a little like Bryce.

If memory lasted, Sarah could conjure the sound of Bryce’s voice in her mind. People say that’s the first thing you forget.

“I think I remember the sound of his voice but I’m not sure, how can you be sure when it’s gone? I think about that sometimes and I try to remember,” Sarah said.

If memory were enough, we would not need Remembrance Day.

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