A club no one asks to join, and a mother who speaks for its members.

There is a club that no one asks to join, and its membership is measured in loss. Virginia Hicks knows this club well. Her daughter, Sapper Mariebeth Short, was twenty-two years old when the armored vehicle she was driving rolled over during a training exercise at CFB Petawawa on September 23, 2002. Short was preparing for a possible deployment to Afghanistan or Bosnia. She was four feet eleven inches tall, a combat engineer who carried bridge pins weighing nearly forty pounds, two at a time. Her nickname on base was Shorty. "She was small in stature," Hicks said, "but mighty, very mighty" .

This year, the Royal Canadian Legion named Hicks the National Silver Cross Mother, an annual recognition of a mother who has lost a child in military service. On Remembrance Day, she will lay a wreath at the National War Memorial in Ottawa on behalf of every Canadian mother who has endured the same loss . The ceremony comes just weeks after four soldiers were killed and dozens injured in a grass fire at CFB Wainwright in Alberta, a tragedy that pulled Hicks back to a familiar grief. "It was like a cold shower," she recalled. "I was like, oh my God, not again. I said, well, I now have four more members of our club" .

The club is one of the reasons she agreed to speak. Hicks wants the families of the Wainwright dead—Sgt. Morgan Wong, Pte. Shaun Farrell, Pte. Aidan Goulding, and Pte. Hayden Lykkemark—to know that support exists, that their loved ones will not be forgotten, and that the Memorial Cross they will receive is not a lesser honor because their deaths occurred in training rather than in combat . "People think that a person who dies in theatre is more important than someone who dies in training, and that has to be so wrong," Hicks said. "You are training so hard so that when you go to theatre, this doesn't happen" .

Hicks speaks from experience on that point. She herself served twenty-nine years in the Canadian Armed Forces, retiring in 2017, with deployments to the Persian Gulf and two missions to Afghanistan . She was a single mother when she arrived at CFB Petawawa for training, having left four school-aged children to pursue a career she believed in. When her daughter announced she wanted to enlist, Hicks and her husband made certain she was serious. When Short chose combat engineering—a front-line role—they warned her about the physical demands and the resentment she might face. Short's reply, as her mother recalls it, was defiant: "I brought the form home for you guys to look at, but this is what I want to do" .

The Memorial Cross itself, commonly called the Silver Cross, was for decades limited to deaths on overseas missions. Rule changes in 2007 and 2008 extended it to all service-related deaths since October 2001, including training accidents at home . Hicks received hers in 2009, years after her daughter's death, and was surprised. She had believed it went only to families of those killed overseas. That misunderstanding is part of why she speaks now. The distinction between dying in training and dying in combat is, in her view, a false one. Both are service. Both are loss.

Every year, Hicks visits the site at CFB Petawawa where her daughter died. A small bush that was there in 2002 has grown into a tall maple, and she places red roses in its branches. She still visits Short's grave several times a month . Her message to the Wainwright families is patient and direct. "It will get easier. I can promise them that, but it'll never go away" . She also urges them to have faith in the military's investigation, which is being led by the Canadian Forces National Investigation Service with support from the RCMP .

There is no ceremony that makes grief smaller. But there is a wreath, laid once a year, and a mother who stands at the cenotaph on behalf of others who cannot. Hicks said she will be thinking of Mariebeth, and of all the parents whose hearts are heavy that day. "You just kind of wish," she said, "that there's never going to be another Silver Cross Mother" .

Image Disclaimer: The image with this article was created using AI generation tools and does not depict the actual individuals or ceremony.

Sources: CBC News, CTV News, The Canadian Press