My story, when was that, when did it happen? The confusion continues everyday while I try to mask over this ‘story’. It’s a story that I’ve finally understood that won’t go away. it’s a part of me, hiding behind the mask waiting for the moment to strike like a lightning bolt bringing the past back to me, and me, with no choice to stop it, because it is an unknown presence of a reality I lived once and will continue to live every day of my life with the tweaks arriving like I mentioned, a lightning bolt breaking open the past that I tried for so many years to loose.
And there it is again, Jimmy this time. His dad pounding on my chest wanting to know the question, you know it, that question of “why”, why is my son dead, someone tell me something. Or the little boy who asks of me, “he wasn’t just my brother, he was my best friend, who will be my best friend now?”
Today the pounding is in my head and deep in my spirit, how could I have brought Jimmy back or for that matter the 108 dead warriors, sons and daughters, fathers, mothers whom I saw a dead, lifeless body yet having some semblance of being there, haunted with their own question of “what happened to me”.
Each day I try to live normal, but as the mask portrays there is “two” within me. The side I try to live and call normal, the that hidden taunting of pain that brings back yesterday with the lifeless faces, bodies unrecognizable for a family to see one last time. They have been cheated because there is no Jimmy to be seen again, only a memory that haunts both family and me, a caregiver with no answers for myself or others. Today is just today with the hollow eye looking into my soul for answers…but nothing come to bring continuous “peace” to a soul.
-Tim
Tim is not alone. There are resources available to those who need it. Please reach out to NCC for support.