My daughter Katie was barely a month old when Princess Diana died. It was due to my baby’s lack of sleeping skills that I managed to watch the funeral four times. As the casket was taken into Westminster again and again and again, I remember thinking, how will I ever get my children to understand? Diana was such a huge part of the lives of people of my generation, and my girls will never really know her.

I had a similar feeling last week when Reagan died. It was not the man himself, though, that I worried my children would not comprehend. It was instead the evil that he ended. My children will never know what it is to live in a world that communism threatened. They will never understand how we felt growing up, and even more how our parents felt, during the "duck and cover" drills, knowing that a large scale nuclear war was possible. We worry about other threats today that are perhaps even more likely, but that one particular horror seems off the horizon.

The end of that world as we knew it came about largely because Reagan was willing to speak truth to evil. He, along with Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II, and others behind the Iron Curtain, said it was not alright that people live under bondage. Many called him simplistic, even dangerous, but he persisted, and put in motion the arms race that would cause the Soviet Union to crumble. When he stood up and said, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!", those inside the Soviet gulags cheered, because they knew Reagan meant it.

I saw that wall firsthand in the summer of 1989 while on a missions trip to West Berlin. One day I crossed over at Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin with some friends, with the 25 marks we had to spend on that side of the wall. Everything was grey: the concrete; the empty shop windows; even the black and white film we bought in desperation when we could find nothing else to purchase. We saw the guards with the guns staring at us as we crossed back through, and our teenage bravado evaporated.

A few weeks later we had to leave Berlin by car to get to Frankfurt. I was travelling with friends from South Africa, Jordan, Egypt, Israel, the United States, and other rather excitable countries on the world scene. We were told we didn’t need a map, because there was only one road to take you from Berlin back to West Germany proper. Travelling in the dark at 4:00 a.m., though, we somehow missed that unmissable road.

We didn’t realize it at first, but by 5:30 the South African driver turned to me and asked "Sheila, in Canada, where does the sun rise?". "In the east," I replied. "Hmm. Same with South Africa." We were looking straight ahead into the sunrise.

We had just passed a sign saying Frankfurt was near, though, so we kept driving. After passing smaller and smaller east German cars, most with PL stickers on them (standing for Poland), we decided at last to turn around. It was a good thing, too. We found out later that we were ten kilometres from the other Frankfurt, the one we didn’t know existed but which was just by the Polish border. That day Solidarity had come to power in Poland, and the Soviets had amassed thousands of soldiers nearby. I hate to think of what would have happened had our motley crew arrived at the border.

So I know a little about walls, and border guards, and guns. My children do not, and will not, and for that I am profoundly grateful.

I can never completely convey to my kids what that era was like, but I can leave them with Reagan’s legacy. Do not be afraid to call evil what it is. Do not accept it, either. Do not listen to others if they mock you, insult you, or condemn you. Stand up for what is right. Do not turn a blind eye to suffering. It is in all of our power to change the world, one person at a time. And so, my darlings, what should we do, in our part of the world, to change it, too?

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