I generally like to think I have a handle on my emotions, and I mostly do, until something comes along that slices in an instant through my layer cake of grief and loss, moving like a hot knife through butter, a torrent of tears and memory.
I finished Kristin Hannah’s book, The Women, on Friday night (12/10, highly recommend), and her novel about the women who served in Vietnam and came home largely invisible was just such a catalyst.
I wept and wept and wept.
So much of who I am is wrapped up in my previous identities as an Army wife waiting patiently, fearfully at home, as a soldier who left our toddler to serve, as a soldier who lost friends to war and addiction afterward, as a veteran seeking peace and wondering at the justice of it all … as the daughter of a Vietnam veteran, the legacy that drove me to serve, mapping out the whole of my adult life with one simple raised hand and a promise to protect and defend.
I’m on the other side now, and these pieces of me are largely invisible. I’m shapeshifting in a small town, a harried sports mom with an overstuffed SUV, bleeding a little on the edges, looking forward to a different life because I’m here now, present now, with the wisdom of hindsight, a trace of cynicism and permanent fatigue, and a deep maternal ache for the young naivete of 24-year-old Molly who thought she was invincible, who thought she could change the world.
My mother asked me, “Do you think these emotions will ever go away?”
We were fortunate, I guess, a pyrrhic victory, not to lose whole generations to this war, our war, but it has carved its way through our individual stories, from the moment the towers fell to the slow ebbing away of our first child with my husband a world away. From the Blackhawk flying low and slow over Jaime’s grave with my body stiff in salute to the last time I threw my arms around my husband, flooded with relief that he made it home mostly whole.
I take those carvings and tuck them carefully away, layers of memory confined to the shadows, contained, controlled. Largely invisible. Until they aren’t.
They will never go away.
And I weep and I weep and I weep.
