By Roy Smith

Life and death situations, when you are in the military on deployment, are constant realities which must be dealt with everyday. What many of us who have been to war learn to understand is that, even when we have traumatic experiences dealing with life and death, once the war is over for us and we return home those feelings do not go away.  Many of us turn to our loved ones to help us cope with the conflict within us which is used to the life and death situations but no longer exists.   All too often, like with myself, we become closed off emotionally to our loved ones and friends.  We even go to such lengths as to learn to press down or bury our reactions and emotions our others. For me in particular, this meant I pressed down the parts of my character that hurt if I showed emotions.

A Life Lesson

            Now that I am retired I have not had to face a life or death situation or emotion in quite some time. However, I have learned in stark reality that I am not so strong when my support system falls apart.  Recently my new wife was in a horrific car accident.  I suddenly found myself having to react to the emotion and stress of her being broken in a hospital bed.  I did all the normal stuff according to every outside observer which visited.  I did not panic and I stayed at the hospital for days waiting for her to wake up. Once she did, I told her I loved her and that everything was going to be ok.  I assured her, once she started apologizing about the accident that the only thing that mattered was that she was going to be ok. 

            However, what only my wife knows, now that she is out of the hospital was that though at first I reacted quite well, as days went by and she still remained unconscious, that I began to panic.  I started to think about how much she meant to me and how much my happiness and self control was dependant on her being in my life.  I knew then that my PTSD was hitting me full force.  I began remembering how I had lost so many friends during the war.  I noticed that my blood ran cold, my heart slowed down, I thought truly my world was at an end if she did not wake up.  A series of emotions I would have never allowed to even enter my sub-conscious. What surprised me even more is that I had no way to deal with them without her there to help me. The person who I turned to when my PTSD was at its worst couldn’t help me because she was the very person I was in fear of losing.  Let me tell you, it was a very terrible three days until she woke up and though it is better now and she is home where I can take care of her, she has had four weeks of complications, infections, hospitalizations, and setbacks. 

Life is Fragile

            When you serve and someone says “life is fragile” we nod and scoff because we know it is, and it is not. My brain didn’t fill with panic when I saw my wife in her condition, it filled with terror. I was terrified and what my life might be like if I had to live without her. I look back on it now and I have learned a great deal about myself and not all of it was good.

            What I had time to learn and think about this last month is how I am going to turn a part of myself back on.   The part that can hear about someone dying and actually care or grieve for them and their families. The part of me I have turned off which couldn’t greave when I got news of my buddy dying.  Before, I would drink for a week straight with those who also knew him and then move on. I now understand that I never really grieved for them, I just went through the motions because I had turned off the ability to feel grief.  However, thanks to my ability to love my wife, in no small part to her incredible patience and guidance, I was able this time to just sit there next to my wife knowing there was nothing I could do but give her my presence and grieve for her. I allowed the grief to become so great that it almost overwhelmed me.  It is not a state I wish to experience again.  That is when I realized that the only thing which had prevented me from losing my ability to cope with my PTSD was my wife.  

            There is always something that I could do in war instead of grieve.  I could fight and kill the enemy, I could return to base, or I could go scale a mountain, find a camp and fix the problem permanently. Now that I am home I have to figure out how to truly deal with my grief as it happens, not when I can find the time. However, when the one person who helped me face the world on a daily basis was hurt I was left alone to face it on my own. I hadn’t realized just how much I had come to rely on her and just how little I had learned to deal with my PTSD on my own.

            So, I sat there holding her hands telling myself to “man up, push through it and be there for her.” In truth I was scared. More scared then in a firefight with not enough ammunition. I could die in a firefight and that would be it cause I would be dead and it would be all over but I realized as I sat there at her side that if she died I would be left to live on my own and those three days taught me that I still don’t do so well on my own.

            What I learned from this is that we have to carry our memories in a sacred way, as though they are more important than the breath we draw. Our loved ones are sometimes the only people that can make us feel alive. I certainly feel this way about my wife now. I never took her for granted before the accident but I certainly have a whole new appreciation for who she is and what she truly does for me. Now that the worst is over and I have faced the love of my life almost passing away I stand with a different perspective then I did just a month ago.

Here Ends the Lesson

            I don’t think that each life is important. My experiences during war and humanity’s veil of civilization shredded before my eyes will never allow me to think of every life in this world as being important again.  What I do think is that the people who love us and make our life worth living are more important than we are. They are the reasons we can be happy. The reasons we can get up in the morning. I am lucky my wife is making a full recovery and will have no external long lasting scars. Despite the many  firefights I have been in and how many times my life was on the line, I don’t think I ever actually thought I could truly die until I believed I might lose her. She is the part of my life that is most important to me and the one part I have learned that I cannot truly do without.  

            Life has a way of reminding you what is important sometimes, even when you don’t want it to.