What I'm posting here is a note I sent to a Gold Star parent that I met here on DK. It's my own personal aftereffect to a Diary I wrote on the 9th, An Analysis Of The Bush Doctrine As It Applies To US Foreign Policy In Iraq -OR- A Father's Lament.
If you want to read our original conversation, you can look at the comments section of the diary above. If you don't mind reading anguish, and you have a fresh script for Prozac, read on.
These two posts are the first time I've felt that I've done something since November of 2005. I mean, not really, I'm not delisuional, yet, but what's more important here is that I "feel" like I've done something. Nobody ever reads my posts and I doubt hardly anybody will read this one. I've never figured out how to get more eyeballs on my offerings. Maybe someday I will; It doesn't matter. I'll never be mistaken for Earnest Hemingway so I'll never make any money doing this.
This is just a shout into the darkness to try and find more people like us. Maybe we should try and start a Gold Star Parents/Kids/Spouses Group here, but so far, it might just be her and me. Does two people constitute a "group? (That was rhetorical BTW, I know the answer. Note the Hemingway comment above. Just another example.)
I hope I can impose on you again. Even if you don't read this, there are secrets that I've kept for neigh on to ten years now. Things I can't figure out who to tell, or who would understand. I know there are support groups I could go to where I could unload, but A) Unless they hold the meeting in my bedroom I'm kinda S.O.L., and 2) I'm not sure I'd avail myself of it if I could. I'm too afraid that I'd hear too much "At least (fill in the blank) died protecting the freedoms that we all hold so near and dear in this great country of ours." It's one thing when the clueless say that shit to me, I can just choke out a half hearted "thanks" and move on down the line. It would be quite another to hear it for a couple of hours from a room full of grieving wives, sons, daughters and parents who desperately hold on to the belief that their loved one's life was given valiantly on the field of battle in defense of the good ol' Red, White & Blue. It's not my place to tell these people that there isn't any Santa Claus; that when you're dead, you're dead; and that he/she died for something more than a monumental foreign policy fuck up and nothing more. If you think you'll find this upsetting, I encourage you not to read past this point. As I said, I just desperately need to unload.
I didn't want to publish this information, but I've been having increasingly "dark" thoughts lately (if you know what I mean and I know very well that you do). I think a big part of my problem is that, in the past, when I had shit to work through, I'd just immerse myself in work. Now that I'm disabled, I don't have ANY outlet to work my grief through. I watch daytime TV, I waste time on the internet, and generally hang out in bed all day. I'm so desperate for a diversion that I started teaching myself theoretical physics to keep my mind occupied. That was working before that greasy fuck of a former SecDef popped his slimy ferret toothed grin OUT of whatever miasmic shit hole he'd been hiding in; and then it hit me. It all came rushing back to me like some hideous nightmare that I know I'll never wake up from. This ALWAYS happens when he or Cheney, or one of the other members of the Funky Bush Bunch of morons opens their fetid maws to make their latest justification of why those kids died in one of, if not 'the', biggest God forsaken foreign policy fuck ups in this country's history. That's why my son died, because this country was too God Damn stupid to tell the difference between Afghanistan and Iraq. He died because of stupidity which is, unfortunately, often the case. (It kills me, in this wondrous age of having the capability to access a whole world of information, literally at your finger tips, your's but for the asking, power unknown to any previous generation in the 4.5 Billion year history of this planet, and we use it to get the latest updates on those horrible Kardashians people and what new fashion abortion Hanna Montana is sporting lately, but we can't look up a fucking map of the middle east?!? Un-fucking believable.)
Truth is, when I saw your last post, I was afraid to read it. I was scared of the pain it might inflict on a mind, body and soul that's known nothing but for almost a decade. Strange thing about pain, after a while the wost part isn't the actual pain, it's the anticipation of the pain. That's what makes you reach for that one more Oxycontin you weren't scheduled or prescribed to have, or that extra ethanol tincture that should truly be called the "forget me now" juice (with all due props to "Arrested Development').
The last time I seriously felt that way was almost ten years ago when I MADE the funeral director open my boy's coffin. I was crazed with equal parts pain (both physical and mental) and grief. Of course he tried to talk me out of it, and, of course, he was right. But I wanted, no, I needed to see exactly what those assholes did to my boy. So, I pulled the old canard, "I'm a Doctor! I'm trained to handle just these sort of things." I'll spare you the details because you have your own grief to deal with, but, suffice it to say, they had to clean the emesis off of his coffin (not that I'd had anything substantial in my gut in over a week. I'd been living on coffee, cigarettes and beer/vodka/Scotch/Root Beer Schnaps/Jack/Gin/etc. for the previous week and a half; and I don't even smoke as a rule. I know! Smoking! I was shocked @ my own self). That one stupid act has haunted my dreams ever since. My wife would bitch @ me because I was waking her up talking in my sleep. I'd tell her some bullshit story about dreaming about being trapped or drowning or some other lie. I guess it was waking up the whole house. Well, I'm sure you can imagine.
I think our session is over for today. Always leave your pt wanting more (therapy). I'm so thankful you came across my little diatribe yesterday. I will ask one more thing of you if I could. If you don't mind, I'd like to publish most of this as a diary. Normally I wouldn't do that but I think people should know exactly, on a deeply personal level, the real life consequences of starting shit in regions of the world that we obviously have no place in nor do we understand culturally. That way, when you get hawks like McCain, or chicken hawks like Graham, or whatever other Henny Penny in the clown car that is the republican presidential aspirants, starts pissing on about wanting to take us back to Iraq to do battle with an equally vapid clown car of self professed "Islamic freedom fighters" that have equally deluded themselves into thinking that they're doing the will of Allah, they need to know that, to quote their hero Rush Limbaugh, "words have consequences".
Don't get me wrong, it's not like I'm trying to self aggrandize myself. I don't think hardly anybody ever reads me on this site (if the number of comments are any indication), but I found you. And if my voice found you, maybe you and I aren't the only ones out there. A fool's errand? Probably. I suppose I'm desperately searching for any meaning or good that can come out of this shit pile that is my life any more. More importantly, it might give some sliver of meaning to Charles's life. Probably not, but a boy can hope cant he?
Let me know. I would of course never publish with your name on it unless you want it there. People need to realize, in this age of flavor-of-the-month Twitter causes, that with all of the verbal diarrhea that these chicken hawks spew forth from their gaping, commodious yaps on a daily basis, that "throw away lines" like theirs have real world, tragic and personal ramifications. Charlie would be 31 in August and just starting a fellowship, or a practice, or just living his God Damn life (emphasis on living). His Mother said his laugh sounded just like mine. I'd give up my soul to just hear either of us laugh just one more time. Opps... time to stop. It's getting hard to see the screen now.
Again, so many thanks to you. I really do feel that I understand your loss in a way that only we could.
Lorem Ipsum, M.D., Ph.D., M.S., B.S. B.I.P. (Boy In Pain, the only one that matters anymore.)
P.S. You should seriously think about using your post to me as a diary. You could certainly speak to aspects of this whole ludicrous shit storm that I've never experienced. This country needs to have their noses rubbed in our pain. They owe us at least that much -or- in other words, "Thanks for the Gumball Mickey." Maybe we should start a "gold star" group here. I certainly have spent the last 10 years thinking that I was in solitary confinements with nothing but my autistic daughter and my cat to talk to. At least YOU heard me shouting. That makes me feel a shit load better and feel less isolated.
P.S.S. If you're a woman of faith, I apologize. I'm not, but who the fuck am I. We'll all find out one way or the other eventually I suppose.