Hope For Veterans

The mind can be friend or foe. For twenty Vets a day, it has become their foe. That’s how many U.S. Veterans per day are committing suicide.

I want to address this incomprehensible fact but do so with trepidation and humility as I have never served in the military and, as such, am acutely aware that my understanding of the problem is limited. I tread lightly upon this topic. However, in my early twenties I tried to commit suicide and so bring a personal, if limited, perspective to what drives a Veteran to conclude that taking their own life is a reasonable solution to their suffering.

In fact, suicide is not motivated by reasonableness but rather by misplaced hope and a lack of forgiveness.

For every individual, suffering has its limits. Be it mental, physical, psychological or emotional, pain can reach the intolerable. When it does, without hope that the suffering can end, or at least diminish, a perverse form of reason takes hold and death seems a “logical” even “desirable” option because death holds out the promise of an end to pain. In fact, this conclusion is neither logical nor reasonable but is driven, in the moment of choice, by the void created when one misplaces hope.

Hope holds the promise of a new and better tomorrow. Hope holds the promise of a return to happiness. Hope holds the promise of a life worth living. In its absence, despair fills the void and with it comes the illusion of never-ending suffering. Although it was decades ago, I remember that moment of choice as if it were yesterday. The pain is so intolerable and death so seemingly pain-free, that there can actually be a perverse euphoria in the decision to end one’s own life.

The sights and sounds of war, while beyond my personal experience, are also often beyond the mind’s ability to integrate and make peace with their aftereffects. I was married to a Vietnam Vet. My current business associate is a Marine Vet who served in Afghanistan. My experience is that some Vets cope better than others, but all are scarred. While some develop mechanisms that permit them to return and function at various levels in their day-to-day lives, I suspect that those who are unable to do so both misplace hope and find it impossible to forgive themselves for having participated in what the mind cannot accept.

When I look back at my attempted suicide, understanding how I had misplaced hope came relatively easily after I survived the attempt and began to live my life in a more positive direction. However, understanding the importance that forgiveness needed to play in healing took much, much longer.

I truly believe that with a contrite heart and a commitment to be better tomorrow than we were yesterday or today, God forgives us everything. It is we who do not forgive ourselves. And in not forgiving ourselves, we suffer again and again each time we replay who we were or what we did. Living in the past, rather than in the possibility of the moment, is too often repetitive, self-inflicted punishment.

While we cannot go back and change the past, it is the present that is malleable. It is the present that holds the opportunity to be the best we can be. It is the present in which we can affect the past by taking the knowledge, and even the pain, of our experiences and using the wisdom gained to take action in ways that heal the wounds of that past and the actions that caused them. So, yes, hope and forgiveness are partners in overcoming despair and judgement.

If you know a Vet, or are one, I would gift this message: You are more than what you have done. You have within you still a spark of hope and the will to let go of the past by forgiving yourself. Dedicate today to doing one kind thing, however small, for yourself and for one other person and let the healing begin. You have never stopped being a child of God. You have only temporarily misplaced the knowing that all is forgiven and, because of that, all is still possible.