Amanda is standing in the sun talking to her brother,  trying not to cry.
Peter MacKay is reading, name by name, the list of  Canada’s war dead.
There are so many names, Amanda thinks, who is going to take care of them all?
Amanda is asking her brother to check in on  all the dead, to take care of them.
Her brother is dead. He’s one of the names,  her brother is among the lost.
Will Cushley was killed in battle in 2006 and Amanda Cushley has been coming to Kandahar ever since.
She’s spent three tours here now as a civilian worker.  She comes to say thank you and because it’s the last  thing she can ever share with Will.
There is going to be a moment, Amanda knows,  when it’s time to let go.
The Canadians are packing up and leaving Kandahar.  They are taking down their memorial and bringing it home.
But first, there’s one last time to say a final farewell.
Amanda’s moment is upon her.

On Nov. 11, 2011, hundreds of Canadian soldiers crowd into the small space behind the old headquarters building. They surround the memorial, row after row, solemn and rigid, armed and ready.

The war isn’t over. A soldier directs the crowd on what to do if there’s a rocket attack. Hit the dirt, he says, then get up and run for cover. “When the bunkers are full, take shelter on the south side of the north blast wall.” People look around, trying to figure out which way is north.

Fighter jets scorch down the runway just a few hundred metres away. Helicopters chomp across the sky.

Minister of National Defence Peter MacKay reads 158 Canadian names. Then he reads the names of the dozens of Americans who died fighting under Canadian command.

As MacKay reads, Major-General Jonathan Vance places a poppy on the memorial, beside their names. Sometimes he places his hand over their likeness; sometimes he pushes his fist into the granite.

The trumpeter blows the Last Post. Silence. A piper plays the Lament. Reveille. “At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them.”

Canadian musician George Canyon sings Danny Boy.

It was the last Remembrance Day in Kandahar. The officials gave official pronouncements.

Peter MacKay said this: “There’s an enormous sense of pride that [these] sacrifices were not in vain. I’m feeling very confident in saying that we have changed this country for the better. Canadian soldiers will leave here knowing they have secured a better future for Afghans.”

Jonathan Vance said this: “This operation, this remarkable journey that Canada and the Canadian Forces had here has, from start to almost the finish, been just about near perfect. And we’ve had bad days. And today we got to remember 158 instances of really bad days. But the fact is that we performed as an army, as an armed forces should.”

Of the lost, the chaplain wanted you to hear this: “In the eyes of the foolish they seemed to have died, and their departure was thought to be a disaster, and their going from us to be their destruction; but they are at peace. For though in the sight of others they were punished, their hope is full of immortality.”

As MacKay reads the roll call of the dead, he knows that each name he reads is piercing a mother’s heart, a sister’s heart, piercing a family’s heart.

Some of whom are right here, standing in the heat, waiting to walk up to the memorial and place a poppy beside the name of their loved one.

Here is the dignified Mabel Girouard, whose son Bobby died in a suicide bomb blast not so far from where she’s currently standing.

There is the anguished Karen Megeney, whose son Kevin was killed by a bullet close by here too.

And the stoic Corporal Kelly James, who became a medic after her brother Mark McLaren died here in 2008.

Then there’s Amanda, standing in the sun trying not to cry, whose brother Will you already know about. “I thought about the other names,” she says. “It seemed like so many names. I asked my brother to check in on them, to make sure they’re OK. I put all this power on him to do this. I don’t want to cry. I talk to him. I have conversations with him. That’s weird, I know, but it gets me through it—hoping  he’s going to be with us and get us through it.”

Amanda says later she was happy and proud to be there with her brother, to place a poppy beside his mischievous face.

But as she walks up to place her poppy, she looks very far from happy. Beyond distraught, Amanda is warped by grief. She looks like someone else.

The memorial is leaving Kandahar, its fate already decided. “This monument, these names, these faces etched in granite here, will be put on permanent display in an appropriate place in the nation’s capital,” MacKay told the crowd of reporters.

Amanda is leaving Kandahar too, her fate undecided.

She places her poppy and thinks about how no one will ever stand right there in front of that memorial again, in the place we lost so many people.

She can feel something changing. The thing that took her brother is done and it feels like everything maybe belongs to history now.

“It’s almost like a story,” she says, “something that happened long ago. There’s no more news. There’s nothing more happening here. The only thing left to tell is what the soldiers tell; or what the families say.”

Amanda’s ready to go.

“This story is done,” she says.

Email the writer at: aday@legion.ca

Email a letter to the editor at: letters@legionmagazine.com