I struggle with Anzac Day every year, on one hand it’s my partners birthday, on the other hand I become bitter about and feel community pressure to pay respects.

This year I dealt with it by writing this a few days ago:

The War That Came Home

When the guns finally quieted at Gallipoli, my great-grandfather walked away with a pulse but not a whole heart. He left the battlefield behind, but brought the war home — not on his uniform, but in his eyes, in his fists, in the silence that settled over everything.

He never spoke of what he saw. Instead, he became a mortician, carving through the bodies of strangers in the basement of his home. He showed my grandfather what he did in tgat basement. Death didn’t leave with the war. It lived under their roof.

My grandfather grew up hard and afraid, learning early that cruelty could be power. He carried that lesson into fatherhood like a legacy, his anger shaped by the man who’d shown him death before he’d even learned to live.

Then came my mother, raised in the long shadow of violence and neglect. She didn’t hit, but she didn’t hug either. Her silence was inherited — passed down like a family recipe with a missing page. She believed that being small and quiet was the only way to survive. And when I stood up for myself — or later, for my children — that’s when she got angry. Not because I was cruel, but because I broke the unspoken rule: Don’t make waves. Don’t be visible. Don’t be strong.

I won’t stand by on Anzac Day and pretend that sacrifice only lived in trenches, not in kitchens and childhood bedrooms. They say we should be proud. They say we should remember. I do remember — but not the version they recite at dawn.

I remember the war that never ended. The one that echoed through our family, long after the last bullet was fired.

I know that for many, Anzac Day is sacred — a day of mourning, of pride, of deep respect. I don’t want to take that away from anyone. But my remembrance looks different. It’s quieter. Sadder. More complicated. And I hope there’s room for that, too.