Reply #114: I am so sorry, Skidmore. Sitting with you for sure.

[Waiting For Everyman]

My sympathies to your cousin, the boy's mother too. I know what it's like to try to get medical or psych help for someone who is denied by every public or private source. I spent several years doing nothing but looking for someone who would, and could, treat my husband, a Vietnam vet (in his 30s at that time). Six years later, he was designated 100% disabled from PTSD. But during those six years, he was called a faker, a liar, every name in the book, and DENIED any kind of treatment or help everywhere, always. It was way more than a nightmare. Very scary.

He was suicidal during that time too. One day I came home from work, and just as I walked into the bedroom, I saw him sitting on the bed but didn't realize much more until I heard a "click". Then I realized that he had a handgun in his mouth - but he was so calm and didn't react to my entering the room. I started freaking out, but he didn't seem to notice me. He just continued in that calm, or more accurately distracted way, staring at the gun in his hand and turning it slightly, with a quizzical, confused look. Just staring at it.

It was loaded and the safety was off. It just didn't fire. A long time later, after thousands of hours of talking through all kinds of things - I had kind of forgotten about it, there were so many crises that it faded away - he told me that that incident had left him completely baffled, and after that, he put aside any thought of suicide. Something "clicked" in his mind too. It had made a deeper impression on him than he had ever let on, he never referred back to it after that until he told me this. I'm not sure that I really understand WHY this stopped him from focusing on suicide. It just did.

So much of these things don't make sense to us, who aren't going through it ourselves. I know I felt that way most of the time, even though I was so "close" to it, and we talked about his thoughts and feelings a lot, I really couldn't grasp what was going on inside his skin. All I could do is try to help, try to let him know that somebody wanted to know what he was going through, even though that wouldn't make it stop.

He had terrifying nightmares from 1969 until his death in 2007. They weren't fantasies, they were about real things that had happened. That's a long time to suffer, and his physical pain was as bad if not worse... dozens of back surgeries, failing organs, eventual paralysis... all from VN.

Why he lived so long after that day (24 years), I don't know. He never did recover, it never did get any better, it was the same pain the whole time. Would he have been better off if it had ended that day? It would seem so. There was really no useful purpose, even to him, for the years of suffering afterward. But this I do know. He ended his life as a person who was determined to survive every day he could - valuing every single day of life, and he was not late in arriving at that pov. He had it fairly soon after that event. I wish I knew what thought process he went through in that time, to arrive where he did - feeling that every day was worth struggling for.

I guess once he decided he wasn't going to end his life himself, he became determined that nothing else was going to easily end it either. What I can say is, during those "extra" 24 years he accomplished a lot of work within his own being. All I can think, is that that's what those 24 years were for. He didn't get any happiness out of them, he didn't get any fun times, but he did travel a long way within himself.

Strangely enough, after all the war he went through (and you wouldn't believe the accounts of what he survived - at one base camp, just one incident, he was one of only two survivors the morning after an all-night hand-to-hand combat with machetes), and all the medical emergencies and diabetic comas, and near-ODs on pain killers, etc.... he died in his sleep in his wheelchair, leaving this world about as gently as that can be. I marveled at that when I found him, I never expected that. I always assumed it would happen in a hospital ER (extreme stress was the constant theme of his life).

I don't know if I'm describing this at all well or not, or if it'll help in any way. Just my thoughts.

Peace and strength to you (((Skidmore))). :hug: And peace and love to your children. Talk to them. Make sure they know they can bring it up later if they want to. I'm so sorry for your loss. Every life ended leaves such an unnatural hole, in the place where it once was.