Death and Dying

I apologize a little bit. I've turned this blog more into a forum for me to express the random things that are running through my head as opposed to an update on what is going on with me in Afghanistan. I'll try and post more about what's going on in Afghanistan but I need to write about one more thing before I get back to that. It's on the subject of death and dying and in particular how it pertains to the issue of war. So let me be upfront with something:


I loathe war. I know this may sound weird for someone who has spent most of his life living in violence, but I hate every aspect of it. Specifically, I hate the the arbitrariness of it and the sudden finality to life that it brings and the way it just continues as if nothing ever happened.

But I can deal with it. Through the circumstances of my life I came to accept it a long time ago. One of the main reasons I do the things I do is because I don't want other people to deal with death and dying if they don't have to and specially if they don't know how to do it. In the Army, especially in the job I had, most of the people have had some experience with death or have prepared themselves to deal with it in some capacity. Sure it can be  mostly bluster and there are of course who delude themselves and only find out the hard way that they can't deal with it, but that's the exception.

That's not the case when working with civilians. There is no preparation for most of these people who usually come from well off, generally sheltered environments. A lot of them have this internal notion that life is somehow fair, even if they theoretically know that it's not. You can always tell who these people are by seeing how they react when someone close to them is killed, especially if it's someone who shouldn't be in the line of fire.

At first it just doesn't compute. They're confused. They can't wrap their mind around the fact that someone they just saw yesterday or a few hours ago is dead. Then they start to think about what it actually means now that this person is gone. They won't exchange pleasantries during breakfast anymore or exchange polite nods on the way to the bathroom. They struggle for a few minutes as they realize that they'll never get a chance to learn a bit more about this person or somehow spend more time. If only they had taken more of an effort before, but now that opportunity is denied to them forever and then so on.

Of course, all of these stages have been exhaustively detailed in psychological literature but for many people in America (or in Canada) they have sufficient time to work through these phases. In war, you may have a few minutes. I forgot how difficult this can be for some people until the other day when I saw someone almost break down in a meeting. Watching this made me wonder how I ever got used to these sorts of things and it reminded me of a conversation I had with my father when I was maybe, 12-13 years old.

I had just come home from school, which meant that my father was just getting up for the day, nursing a hangover. I sat down as I usually did to watch afternoon television. Normally this bonding moment would usually pass in silence with only the occasional strained conversation that typically ended up with me getting in trouble for something. During a commercial break he asked me to grab him a glass of orange juice. While pouring the orange juice he just kinda blurted out "Oh, by the way..Doug died last night".

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Break.

Doug Wolfe was a friend of my father who was born in Cleveland, or Cincinnati, one of those shitty towns in the midwest. He was a heavily tattooed white guy who used to stay around the house, doing odd jobs for cash to include watching me when my father was off somewhere and my mom had to work. He was an incredibly nice guy who had a bad run of it in life. I'd learn at his funeral that he was dyslexic and because there were no school programs to help people with dyslexia when he was coming up he dropped out of his middle school to go work. He'd drift in and out of sobriety and financial solvency over the years as he struggled to make things right without the semblance of an education and what could only be described as a pretty standard amount of bad luck and a propensity to make bad decisions. I remember being amazed that despite all this he was able to hold intellectual conversations with my mother, but in retrospect I have no idea if this was true. His funeral was sparsely attended and I wore jean shorts.

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I wasn't quite sure how to take the nonchalant manner in which this information was conveyed so I did what anyone else would have done in this circumstance, I put the orange juice down. Over the span of a few more commercial breaks I was able to determine the manner in which he died, heroine overdose under some train tracks, and the date of the funeral. That was about the full extent of the conversation we had about it. As a kid, I guess we take our cues from those around us and I always presumed that this was how most people dealt with tragedy in their lives. This little exchange taught me a lot about how to deal with situations like the one where life is treated so shallowly.

Even still, it always gets to me when I have to watch another person deal with these things. It's one thing for a person like me, or a person who has made the same choices as me. It's another thing for a person who doesn't have to go through that, who never made that choice. To me, it's the ultimate tragedy of war. If I died tomorrow, I would hope that people don't give it a second thought because it's what I did.

But for war, the reality is that today it's rarer and rarer that it's the people like me who suffer the most in these things. It's typically the people on the periphery  and those caught up in the midst of the fight who suffer the most, who shoulder the most risk and weather the brunt of the storm. So, remember the next time you're reading some article on the war or listening to someone talk about these things.