Reflections
#1: Dealing with grief is about more than just moving on
Deciding to retire from the US Army after twenty years prompted me to do some much overdue reflection on life. I think many of us have a tendency to settle into routines and allow the substance of our past experiences imperceptibly slip from our recollection. After so many years of living among extraordinary people in disparate places, I felt that I owed it to myself and my children to capture at least some of that memory before it became too distant.
So, I committed myself to writing a kind of pocket oral history — short snippets of thought rooted more in themes than specific events or chronologies. This essay is the first of what I expect will be many that focus more on the meaning of what I’ve lived through than the dates and locations. My hope is that, in years hence, my kids and those who closest to me might know better who I was and what I wanted to pass on to them. This is for them.
It hit me hard. In an instant, a torrent of emotion overwhelmed my stoicism, and I wept deep, crippling, tears standing at the altar of West Point’s Old Cadet Chapel. Without warning, my proud composure had collapsed into one emotion: grief.
I was on the last leg of a morning-long tour of the US Military Academy with the youth of my home church in New York. It was my last year on the academy’s faculty. So, I had offered to give the church youth group a guided tour around West Point, using the military academy’s history to talk about principles of military service and faith.
The tour went smoothly. We visited the usual places on the picturesque academy grounds — from the commanding vantage point of Fort Putnam overlooking the bend of the Hudson River down to the river itself. I had the youth group stand in a block formation and discussed the contest between horse cavalry and infantry before and through the gunpowder revolution. We talked about tactics, the value of terrain, and the play of emotion in battle.
The Old Cadet Chapel was our final stop on the academy grounds before we concluded the tour at the museum. It is a beautiful building on the edge of the West Point cemetery. Built in the neo-classical style in 1818, the chapel recalled the military academy’s earliest golden age with its white columns and plaques commemorating past heroes. I had chosen the chapel as a quiet place to let the kids and their chaperones rest in the pews and to share a little bit of myself.
Scars heal over, but they never completely leave us. It was something that I was aware of but never really appreciated until that moment in the chapel.
I am no hero. My service has been guarded by Providence from the traumas that weigh on so many of my comrades. I’ve not felt the crack of bullets whizzing past my head or the dizzying punch of an improvised explosive device. My bruises are of the more banal variety. The apprehension of perhaps never seeing my son, who was born less than week into my deployment to Iraq, or the whistle and thump of a rocket landing a hundred meters away.
I shared with the youth some impressions of those things — nothing real specific. Then, I turned their thoughts to the fallen in battle, inviting them to see the markers in the cemetery as once-living individuals rather than mere stone and inscriptions. To make it real, I connected them to my comrades.
I introduced them to James, to Kim, to Ben, and others no longer with us. I introduced them to a daughter who graduated from high school without her dad who had been killed on a road that I knew well. I told them about a parents’ only child shot down over Baghdad that I had served with in Korea. In making the sacrifices of others, connected to me, tangible, I stumbled through the door myself and met the hurt I had never ventured to meet before.
I thought I knew my pains. I believed that I had dealt with them and moved on. So, I brought those memories to the church youth thinking that it was safe, but in truth, I had moved on only by mistaking my numbness at something as unfamiliar as abrupt violent death for the equanimity that I prized. You can’t know individuals, valuing their company, and not be cut by the loss of them, and, by being cut, bear abiding grief. I was willfully, albeit unintentionally, blind to that grieving — locked away. I was therefore unprepared for my own conversation about loss and sacrifice. So, I cried.
Abiding grief is the evidence of our empathy as well as our own sense of loss. As such, it can lead us home. Home, in this sense, is our awareness of the present, of the afflictions of others, and of our own frailties. In unadulterated grief, inconsolable rage and moroseness are cast aside because we are moved by the tragedy and loss for its own sake rather than our own sense of injury. It is in lifting us out of ourselves that grief empowers even as it persists.
Empowerment, however, is not a given. Grief can turn inward. When it turns us away from the world, grief nourishes corrosive anger, self-loathing, guilt, and desperation. With military veterans committing suicide at alarming rates, the need for us to understand what it is to be empowered is present and urgent. As we examine ourselves and as we look out for each other, we should commit to understanding grief, distinguishing the inward focused from the open and engaged, and thereby be present for our friends when they need us.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this essay are those of the author alone and do not represent those of the US Army, Department of Defense, or any other agency of the US government.
