PAINFUL MILESTONE

It’s been a year since Brian’s parents said good-bye to him in Alaska prior to his being deployed to Afghanistan.  His  fellow soldiers are beginning to rotate home.  That makes it vivid again that he ISN’T “coming home.”  And the family will no longer have the pleasure/distraction of sending “care packages” to the rest of his unit.  Connections to him are fading.  Each one that ends makes his absence emotionally more final.

Brian’s body came home last summer, but he didn’t.  Vitality (literally life force) was so much a part of his personality that an inanimate body clearly was not him. I felt the same way looking at my mother’s body a few weeks ago.  It was so unlike her to be still, much less lying down, that it was jarring to see her body, so familiar visually, but so unnaturally at rest.  (She was the kind of person who would do a crossword or read the paper while “watching” TV.  She would park her car in the furthest spot away from where she was going “for the exercise.”)

Do Brian’s fellow troops feel the same way?  Is there a reluctance to leave the physical location where he died?  To return to normal routines, with people who may not have known him, who definitely did not share the combat experiences that killed him and threatened them every day?

Some may be eager to leave it all behind.  Lucky them to be able to do so.

Others will revisit battle scenes in their dreams, sometimes even when they are awake.  That’s part of what PTSD does to you.  (I hope they seek help.  There is a treatment called Prolonged Exposure therapy (“PE”) that can be very effective for PTSD fairly rapidly.)

The family is just left with the emptiness.  As we were sorting and packing Mom’s belongings after her death, choosing what to take to remember her by, Mary declined everything, saying, “There is no one after me to whom this would mean anything.”  It brought fresh tears to my eyes as the depth of her loss was again revealed.

When Brian died, his parents’ hopes for being grandparents died too.  Their trust in their son’s loving care and help in making hard decisions for their old age died too.  Now who will choose their nursing home?  Who will visit them there?  Who will pack up their belongings when they die?  When they die will there be anyone alive who remembers Brian?  Will the memory of him die with them?  As long as his fellow troops were still in Afghanistan, still fighting the war that killed him, there was certainty that his death was remembered and honored.  Now that they are coming home, that their lives will return to “normal,” will that change?

I looked with curiosity and detachment at graves of WWII soldiers in Arlington National Cemetery when I was there in December.  They were elements of history to me.  Yet, to someone, once, not so very long ago, they were comrades in arms, beloved husbands, sons, brothers.  Brian was my nephew, my sister’s son.  I remember his laughter, his energy, his intelligence, his goofiness.  I don’t want him relegated to history!

No wonder Mary wants veterans’ graves decorated and memorialized.

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© Touched by the War: A Journey From Oblivion to Awareness 2010. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Martha M. Gillis and Touched by the War with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

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