Reminder that Poe Dameron Bey was born in wartime, two years after the Battle of Yavin and two years before the Battle of Endor. He was born in a time of uncertainty and ongoing violence. I like to think of him as a “hope baby” whose parents finally had the courage to conceive him (or were just carried away lol) after the Rebels struck a blow against the Empire. It finally looked like there might be a future worth raising children in.

One year after Poe was born came the setback in Hoth when the Rebels were scattered, a General of the Rebellion was captured, and the one living Jedi was badly injured. A year after that came news that the Empire was building a second Death Star, which if completed meant the total subjugation of the galaxy. Poe spent his earliest years in a time of constant turmoil when his lives and the lives of his caregivers could be snuffed out at any moment, whether by a weapon of mass destruction or in battle or execution.

It is canon that Poe rarely saw his parents during these first two years of his life, the first years that are so crucial to forming lasting attachments. These were the final years of the war when both his parents were away risking their lives in a fight against what seemed an unstoppable evil. Any call could bring the news that one or both of them were dead. Any knock on the door could be Imperial Security forces come to take Poe and his caregivers into custody as family members of Rebels.

The maternal grandfather who raised Poe no doubt shielded the child from these realities as best he could, but children know. They can tell when their caregivers are sad and anxious. They also miss their parents something fierce and ask, with or without words, when are they coming? Are they thinking of me? Do they love me? Poe would have grown used to the long partings because he had to, but his face would have brightened at any chirp of the comm, any knock at the door even as his grandfather’s heart sank.

Leaving a young child for even a day can be hard; what was it like for Poe and his parents to be separated for months at a time, never knowing when they would see each other again? How many hours did Poe’s grandfather spend hunched over the communicator while little Poe slept in the next room, trying to guess where his daughter and son-in-law might be deployed, wondering if he would be told in time if the unthinkable happened, wondering if he would have to grab Poe and run if things turned bad? Where could they even run to in a galaxy bent on their annihilation?

Poe and tens of thousands of other children like him endured countless hours of fear and loss along with their families. He knew what it was like to feel a love like cold burn in the absence of the people he yearned for. He knew what it was to have his young heart pressed and shaped by the unending weight of fear. He was one of the lucky ones who got his joyous reunion with his parents, but the effect of those early years would never have gone away.

Six years later, just at the blossoming of his promised happily-ever-after, came the shattering loss that even war had not managed to wreak. Standing with his father to bury his mother, eight-year-old Poe would have been reminded that peace guarantees nothing and that life can be as uncertain and as cruel as war.

He carried forward these lessons, the terrors and the joys, the ache of sorrow that would never go away, to honor his parents’ courage and to make sure other children would not endure what he had. He could not take away tragedy and loss, that was way above his paygrade anyway. What he could do was choose how to react, and he took to the skies after his mother, he fought with principle and honor like his father, and he chose courage and caring like his grandfather.

His parents and grandfather were with him when he abandoned the certainty of military life to wade into a murky fight against a shadowy threat. They were with him when he fought battle after battle, not only in the cold of space but in the thickets of intrigue and espionage. They were with him when he refused to abandon a village doomed to slaughter. They were with him when he was tied to a torture chair, when he was having his mind turned inside out in such agony that he shattered a droid’s audio receptacle with his screams.

The child born in war grew to be a warrior in another, the one thing his parents sacrificed so much in the hopes of preventing. None of them could help the outbreak of this second war that was all their nightmares come to life, but they could choose what they did in response to it. Poe chose to fight, to protect, to sacrifice. The power of choice, after all, was the only power he had in a universe without guarantees.