“That’s it, then?”
I leaned forward from the chair next to my father’s hospital bed, my hands folded in my lap. I had just told him hospice was his only option. The doctors could do no more for his failing kidneys. His body could no longer fight the infections that were ravaging his body.
This is not a story about end-of-life choices, nor even about the choices he made during his life that got him and me to that raw moment when there was no hiding from difficult truths.
This is about Memorial Day.
It’s perhaps our most solemn national holiday, meant to honor our citizen soldiers who died in wars to defend freedom. I mean no disrespect to those sacrifices when I say that my father did not physically die on that battlefield in Korea, the night his buddy got gunned down next to him and he took grenade shrapnel in his back.
He did not die from his wounds the next day; in fact, he was sent out with a corpsman at daybreak to retrieve the body of his fallen comrade. He did not die during that ongoing brutal battle for Old Baldy, and he did not die in the night artillery barrages and attacks that would invariably come in his 72 straight days in combat.
He was 21 years old when the ceasefire took hold. He’d made it through alive, but a piece of him was dead.
For the hundreds of thousands of American soldiers who have died in war, there are multiples more who see terrors and shake hands with death and then come home, carrying an anguish that the rest of us cannot imagine.
We rightly venerate those who don’t make it back. Those who do, we marry and live with and are raised by, and many parts of the pain of surviving are passed on and continue to live among us.
During the Korean War, the symptoms and reactions to that trauma were called “gross stress reaction.” Now we know it as post-traumatic stress disorder. We accept it as a common effect of being in combat or other extreme situations.
I wasn’t around to see my father return to the United States and reintegrate, to find work and party with his friends and meet my mother and start a family. But I was there for his last 58 years and I was affected by and challenged by and in some ways molded by his struggles.
The alcoholism, the lack of commitment or empathy, how he could swing from “fun-loving John” to fits of anger with the smallest provocation. How he would be a stranger’s best friend but mean and unforgiving to his own family.
And always – always – how he would run away from conflict, and wall himself off emotionally and even physically. I have endless stories, but the one that might sum it up is how after one argument in 1990 we did not speak to one another for 10 years. And in the middle of that period, five years in, we crossed paths at a rock concert, spotted one another, said “hello” and hugged and then walked our separate ways.
You see, sometimes the dead walk among us. And when they do, they pass along that suffering in ways that cannot be accounted for.
Ultimately, this is a story about understanding and empathy and growth – my own. And that’s what brings us back to Memorial Day, and that end-of-life scene in the hospital. Do I know that all of my father’s struggles were due to his war experiences?
No. Surely he was shaped by other factors, including a tough upbringing from the Depression Era into World War II, when his five older brothers all joined the U.S. Army, as well as core family dysfunction.
But I know for a fact that when I’d be on one of my sporadic visits to him in the last 15 or so years of his life that our awkward catching up would eventually turn to war stories. In some, he found the humor in training camp hijinks or escapades from R&R in Tokyo. But every single story time ended in choking sobs, and then apologies.
I didn’t learn about the Korean War in those stories. I learned about what had happened to my father, what explained his difficulty in loving others and being vulnerable, why he used alcohol until his body couldn’t take it anymore and then switched to marijuana and prescription painkillers.
We both saw the inevitable unfolding, especially when he began skipping dialysis treatments. He talked about his end, and how he wanted his life to be celebrated. It was not with a military funeral, a 21-gun salute and a folded flag handed to his children.
He wanted a party, and his ashes scattered in the Straits of Mackinac, where he’d run to many years before to find something resembling peace.
On this Memorial Day, Dad, I hope you have found it.
If you or anyone you love is struggling with PTSD right now, or issues related to military service, please click on this link for help from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs hotline.
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John Hiner is the vice president of content for MLive Media Group. If you have questions you’d like him to answer, or topics to explore, share your thoughts at [email protected].
