Remember

I don’t deny I was one of those people that went to see Titanic multiple times in the theater. I thought it was a good movie. I still think it’s a good movie. I always had a fascination with the history, which I think they recreated pretty thoroughly in cinematic form. I remember when my sister and I took my mother to see it. She wasn’t as overwhelmed with fascination as we were. But her first comment as the lights came up always stick with me. Celine Dion’s song was playing and my mother asked, how would one go on?

Okay, put Celine Dion out of your head if you don’t like the song. It is pretty saccharine. But the idea… the question my mother posed as we shuffled back to our car has stayed with me for twelve years. I think of that when I read a story, watch a play, or go to a movie. When the lights go down or the chapter ends on the disaster, how do the living continue? How does one heal and make it through each and every day without cracking and making his own quietus? How?

I mean… Shakespeare always annihilates his dramatis persona in the tragedies. But there is always someone left to tell the story. How do they do it? Okay, I don’t feel sorry for Iago. But Friar Lawrence, Horatio, MacDuff, Edgar… how do they make it through the day after living through all that? After witnessing such brutal heart-wrenching death? Even when vengeance is satisfied. The people are still gone.

But that’s fiction. I can manipulate my imagination to suppose they find a happy distraction to live out their lives. Or maybe they can visit the Lacuna Corporation and wipe the bad spots out of their memory. In fiction, people have many more options.

Life… life requires so much more. And yet people do it. They go on. They survive. But some things never leave them. No matter how many years or happy moments come in between. The ache, the sorrow, the guilt, the awfulness is always an open wound.

I can’t imagine the open wound that war leaves on one’s soul. I can read about the horror. Or find a twisted fascination with the replication of a battle on a large screen. But it’s… not entertainment. For so many men and women, it is a reality too awful to be real. It changes the color of everything forever after. I guess. I don’t really know. I haven’t lived it. I know I grew up with a father who won’t play cribbage because the last time he did in Vietnam he witnessed something so unspeakable he can’t enjoy sitting in front of the board thirty years later. I read the newspaper about soldiers who come home from the Middle East and struggle to put their lives back together. It isn’t my life… but aren’t they giving up this piece of their lives and sanity to preserve my own?

Over here, we call today Veteran’s Day. I suppose that works. But, I like how they call it Remembrance Day abroad. So people remember. But it’s only one day for the rest of us. For those who lived it and survived, I doubt it is only one day. It is every day. Every day they find the courage to keep going and continue living in spite of what they saw and experienced.

I am truly humbled by and grateful to those who gave their lives in war. But the ones who came back to tell the story and keep on going give me pause on this gray November day. Of them, I am truly in awe.