But one day you may find yourself packing your bags, and realizing it is time to leave. You may wonder why it took so long; more likely you will wonder how you were able to find the door at all.
And the memories are powerful. They are of LIFE. Whatever suffering there was, it was real. It was authentic. It involved the gut, the inner animal, the wide awake, the resilient.
I GET, I think, veterans whose task is made harder by the other people in the room with them, especially those they left on the battlefield oh so long ago. Leaving is hard enough: leaving someone behind makes it exponentially harder. This is called traumatic grief, or survivor’s guilt, but I’m not entirely sure that is the best way to put it. I think fidelity to the person becomes entwined with fidelity to the grief and pain.
And the solution, I think, is to see those people not in your past, but your future. Time is a circle. They are not dead. In some respects, this is all a giant game, made far too serious because we don’t know the rules.
Here is a good song for leaving: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mk2SNcpTNbs#! 32:05 is where it starts.