Virginia Hicks has spent every September 23rd for the past twenty-two years driving three hours from Trenton to the Mattawa Plains at CFB Petawawa. She carries red roses — two for the memorial bearing her daughter’s face, ten for the maple tree that marks the exact spot where 22-year-old Private Mariebeth Short died. This Remembrance Day, the retired sergeant will carry a different weight: the Royal Canadian Legion has named her the 2024 National Silver Cross Mother, entrusting her to lay a wreath at the National War Memorial in Ottawa on behalf of every military family that has buried a child.
A Sapling Becomes a Monument
The maple was barely a sapling when Hicks first saw it, pushing through the grass beside the wreckage the day after the accident. Today it stands bushy and tall, a living witness to a mother’s ritual. Short, a sapper with the 2 Combat Engineer Regiment, had been standing with her head above the gunner’s hatch of a light armoured vehicle during a training exercise when a front tyre struck the groove of an old slip trench. The wheel assembly sheared off. The vehicle rolled twice. In the scramble to pull her back inside, her gear tangled. She was declared dead at the scene.
Eighteen months later, an investigation report concluded a substandard weld in the new vehicle caused the crash. The finding brought no closure, only confirmation that her daughter’s death was preventable.
The Soldier’s Soldier
Hicks knows the weight of the uniform intimately. She grew up among the crosses at Vimy Ridge and the beaches of Dieppe, her childhood framed by a father who served as a military firefighter and a family home in Belgium still pockmarked by Nazi bullet holes. At thirty, a single mother of four school-aged children, she walked into a recruiting office in Regina and signed up. Boot camp recruits half her age nicknamed her “Mom.” She traded ironing for boot polishing, woke sore and told herself to shut up and go to work.
By the time she retired in 2017, she had deployed to the Persian Gulf and served two tours in Afghanistan. Logistics was her trade — co-ordinating the supplies that keep an army moving — but the ethos never left her. “When you sign on the dotted line,” she says, “that’s your life for your country.”
A Daughter’s Defiance
Short announced her intention to enlist a year after graduating high school. Her mother and stepfather, Warrant Officer Brian Hicks, made certain she understood the reality. Combat engineering — building and demolishing roads and bridges under fire — would test her in ways basic training never could. As the smallest soldier in her crew, she would be sent into the tightest spaces, often standing neck-deep in cold water. Male soldiers might resent her presence, assume she lacked the strength.
Her response was characteristic: “Oh, for God’s sake. I brought the form home for you guys to look at, but this is what I want to do.”
She was a competitive long-distance runner despite standing under five feet and weighing less than one hundred pounds. “She was as strong as she was short,” her mother says. The last phone call home came days before the accident. Short had just qualified to drive the light armoured vehicle for the first time. Her stepfather warned her over the line: “You realise this is a very big piece of equipment.” She laughed. “Yes, yes, Warrant, I’ll be careful.”
The Weight of the Wreath
This year’s appointment carries a fresh gravity. Less than a month before Remembrance Day, four soldiers died and dozens were critically injured in a devastating fire at CFB Wainwright in Alberta — another training exercise gone terribly wrong. Hicks will kneel at the cenotaph thinking not only of Mariebeth, but of the newest grieving families. She will think of what her daughter might have accomplished, of all the sons and daughters who never came home.
In the Hicks basement, Short’s beret rests alongside bridging pins for Bailey bridges — she would carry two at a time. A piece of debris from the crash site sits beside a portrait in the living room. And every September, before the drive to Petawawa, the family watches a grainy video from the year before the accident: Short laughing with her crew, concentrating on a math task while testing new bomb suits. Alive. Vibrant. Whole.
“You see the life she had,” Hicks says. That memory carries her through the day.
Why it Matters
Virginia Hicks embodies the continuum of service and sacrifice that binds Canada’s military families across generations. Her appointment as Silver Cross Mother arrives at a moment when the perils of domestic training — long overshadowed by overseas deployments — have been thrust into sharp relief by the Wainwright tragedy. By honouring a veteran who lost her own child on home soil, the Legion acknowledges a truth too often forgotten: that the uniform carries risk long before it reaches a war zone, and that the grief of military families does not discriminate between peace and conflict. Hicks’s vigil at the maple tree, now entering its third decade, stands as a testament to the endurance of remembrance — and a reminder that behind every name on a cenotaph, there is a mother who still brings roses.
