The Meaning of Life (Losing Someone)
Something I felt compelled to write.
The Meaning of Life (Losing Someone)
Periodically I write an article about grief in the hopes I can reach out to people and help. It is often hand in hand with PTSD because I worry often about Rich’s friends and comrades, especially when something happens as it did in NS.
Events like this often cause triggers no matter the real cause behind the tragedy. But the point is this event caused death.
PTSD in fact is a very loose term for many different aspects of what soldiers go through. One of the main things are flashbacks to events which an individual would really rather not see. One they might revisit over and over until they are living the moment rather than in real time.
Let me tell you a little bit about that and what it is like. I know because I am a parent who lost a child. A traumatic event. It is five years believe it or not, since we lost Rich to the North Saskatchewan River. I can still see that river as I saw it the day we went to Emily Murphy Park. I see its insidious rippling. I see the faces of the soldiers who ran with him, blank with shock that Curnow had disappeared. I hear my own voice crying out when we were told he’d been found. I see that flag draped coffin - the shock of it, knowing my son was inside. I see a lone out of uniform soldier standing by the side of the road, hand on heart as Rich’s hearse passed.
I see it all like it was a few moments ago. I am there. And everything in me wants to change it, to reverse it, to go back, to be able to do something to stop it.
You can’t, and the guilt of that, whether it reasonable or not, stays with you. It is indelibly imprinted in your brain along with every what-if you’ve ever known.
So how do you move forward from that?
You don’t.
You move sideways, upwards, downwards, in any direction. What you do is change. You don’t ‘get over it’, you don’t ‘find peace’, you don’t ‘learn to live with it’ or any other platitude spouted. You become someone else while being that person who has gone through something/anything no human being should.
You can reach for a bottle or pills or wacky backy to drown out the reality, but the reality will always come back to bite you.
What you do, and this isn’t a platitude, is remember the people who need you, who love you, who rely on you. Because you are never alone in your grief. There are people with you, sharing that grief, who are just as devastated and confused as you are. On a battlefield you are not alone. Instinct is to tamp the trauma down, hold it inside because you think no one else can understand. There is truth in that because no one else sees what you do, but it isn’t the entire truth. There are others who think, what-if I’d.... There are others reaching out to that bottle to drown the possibilities.
You can let it drown you or you can surface above it. You are allowed your grief. You are allowed to scream at the world at the damned unfairness of it all. You are allowed to cry - why wasn’t it me? Why take someone in their prime of youth and not me or that pervert in jail, or that bad person there? Why did that person survive and my son didn’t?
Because it is damnably unfair and the guilt is because you couldn’t do anything about it.
Yet you can do something about living.
In the beginning you can’t talk about it because it is too hard. Because it brings it too close, because it brings up emotions you aren’t sure you can handle again or you think no one else would want to hear. That’s actually wrong because it builds and builds inside you populating demons who seek to reassure you that NO ONE wants to know. It is your own very private load to bear. Yet it is not. That is selfish.
At first you are like a rosebud waiting to bloom. A tight little world of emotion which dare not burst forth and bloom, but gradually you realise that people do want to hear, because they have their own grief, their own memories and when you tentatively begin to talk that bud starts to open. Stuff you magnify out of proportion inside? Suddenly someone says, well I lost my baby, my daughter, my son, my father. Ah, says you, but mine was different. Of course it was, but grief isn’t exclusive and it takes us all in different ways. Yet we all, unfortunately, belong to the same club and in that we have a connection.
You are not alone.
As a mother who lost a son, when I see other sons or daughters take their lives I am devastated because I want my son back. Part of me wants to cry - how dare you! Do you even realise what you are doing to those left behind? Because that is a truth I know, that there is a vacuum I can NEVER refill; a horrible, horrible vacuum. My son was lost in an accident, he didn’t choose to hurt me, but by taking your life you are choosing to hurt your loved ones. That’s harsh, I know but it is how I feel. Don’t cause that grief, please. And it does hurt, every time a soldier takes their lives because they cannot face what they went through. It hurts ME.
All I have left are pictures.
Although, that isn’t the entire truth either. I have memories which I now share with anyone who will listen. I find joy in those memories when I can’t have the real person. I find joy in those who love me, whether those are people or animals. I find joy in loving those people who loved him. I need those people to speak to, to share.
It will never be the same, no, but it is possible to change, to be able to live, to be able to function almost normally, and to laugh. There is nothing wrong with that, either. But to do that, you have to speak. You have to let others know how you feel. You think they won’t understand? Try me.
Your life is precious. It is fleeting and far too short. Tomorrow you might cross a road and a car come out of no where. Gone. You might be but the echoes of your life live on, indelibly imprinted on your loved one’s hearts. That hurt never goes away and five years on a simple word can trigger a grief you thought you’d left behind. I don’t fight it anymore, I embrace it, because it is mine. I still scream at the unfairness of it all, while I take joy in a hug from my husband or an achievement from another son, or one of my daft horses doing something. I laugh at something someone says at work. Because, I am alive and that is a battle I won’t give up on. It is worth it through all the tears.
If you share.
Talk. Don’t hold it inside. You’d be surprised how many understand.