Mayor Cam Guthrie delivered a poignant and personal address at Friday's Remembrance Day service at the Sleeman Centre.
Guthrie told those gathered that growing up it was an unwritten rule that you didn't talk about the war around his grandfather Gordon Guthrie, a medic in the Canadian military who landed in France shortly after D-Day.
"We all knew we weren't supposed to bring it up if we didn't have to," said Guthrie.
One day, when he was around 11, Guthrie came across a battered pair of old binoculars in his grandfather's closet. They were a souvenir taken from a German prisoner of war.
"We sat together a little longer at that table, looking through the binoculars outside his kitchen windows at the trees, the birds and the little stream running through his backyard," Guthrie said.
They were then returned to the dark closet.
"In the years since, I have thought about them often," Guthrie said.
"I thought about the people who held them in their hands during the war. They didn't bring those binoculars up to their eyes to look at the birds, at a calm running stream or to take in the fullness of green leaves on trees."
Instead they would have seen fear, struggle and horror, the Mayor said. Bravery, sacrifice, death, destruction and tears.
"Those binoculars have come to represent for me, everything my grandfather saw and experienced but perhaps couldn't talk about."
"They have come to represent, for me, the duty and responsibility we all have to always remember the sacrifices made by those who served."
Guthrie urged those gathered to view veterans and troops through a new lens, "the lens of gratitude, the lens of thankfulness, the lens of respect and the lens of our deep love for each of them."
Friday's service was attended by roughly 2,500 people at Sleeman Centre, which was preceded by a separate service at McCrae House, the IODE Laying of the Wreaths at Guelph Central Station and a parade from the armoury to the arena.
Following the Mayor's remarks, veteran and former longtime local Royal Canadian Legion president Moe Ferris urged people to remember the sacrifices made by "the heroes that stayed home and have never been recognized" - the mothers, wives and children of those who go off to serve their country.
"They had their own form of PTSD," Ferris said. "We still don't know all the problems that this PTSD caused."
