Memorial-- a blend of integration and peace with past, and seeing the present for what it is... More like an "onion" with many layers, than a solid mass of consistent reality.
Resources:
- Veteran's Help
- Identifying and Treating PTSD
- Resources for Victims of Violent Crime
- A Ritual to Let Go of the Past
MEMORIAL DAY 21 YEARS LATER: Forgiveness is more than healing, it is finding a completeness in acceptance and transcendance. Circle of life.. circle of pain... the key is in recognizing when you are traversing a path, and when you are creating a circle.
It was around memorial day weekend some 21 years ago, when I survived the violent assault at the hands of a stranger--a Vietnam Veteran in some sort of drug induced, recurring Post Traumatic Stress Disorder event. You know that it was not until this Memorial Day that my father and I talked about it over coffee... The importance of caring, really caring for one another, and our soldiers..
Dad told me about his Army service in Germany.. Of my Grandpa's service in WW2.. and I could finally tell a family member in my immediate family something I thought I never could about understanding the situation of what happens when you are forced to fight to survive..
It would take me some time to be able to understand that responsibility we have to care for one another... and what could happen when we fail to recognize and act on the perception that all is not well.
Healing from my assault was something I was pretty sure might never happen.. that I would be forever broken... In retrospect, and time, I found a forgiveness.. Forgiveness of a man who never got the care he needed, a man who apparently suffers much and must continue to fight a war and take hostages for interrogation, to survive. I wonder what his family might have been like.. I wondered what happened that would cause a person to have lost so much, that it was easier to kill or be killed.
On Memorial Day, I choose not to war for peace.
I choose radical forgiveness and the optimism to define and act on better conditions.
I forgive "Bear" the soldier who fatigued himself, medicated himself, and still lived an unthinkable horror that played out in his mind so strong that all around him might feel his pain. He served our country, and probably gave alot for the time he was in Vietnam. Some came back with more of a burden than others.. It was not a contest, it was a reality to be managed.
I forgive myself for not being smarter when I was clearly out muscled. I tried to face recovery, as did my attacker, to fatigue and medicate myself to survive the trauma, that I was certain was way bigger than what I could handle. Before "Bear", I had not heard of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder-- we did not talk about that sort of thing.
From this experience, I have appreciated a new freedom, and a new happiness.. The sort of thing that comes from not regretting the past, nor wishing to shut the door on it... To be able to love, regardless of experience, to forgive others and to give for others to see a more optimistic possibility and reminder that they have way more capacity for love and recovery than they give themselves credit for.
