The new puppy Satch is growing into his personality, more alert and curious and affectionate. When he sees me come into the room he runs to me making excited noises with his clumsy soup-plate paws akimbo. All three dogs play together happily. As yet the word ‘No!’ means zilch.
Went up to the main street cafe this morning to get milk and the air was thick with teargas after a protest march about electricity costs got riotous. As the gas made my eyes burn and itch, I had flashbacks to all kinds of traumatic memories of marches and rallies from years back. War never goes away. I came home and sat aat the kitchen table waiting for my breathing to calm and level out. By chance — serendipitous luck — I found this moving article by Janine di Giovanni about a two war correspondents settling down to a normal life in Paris and finding out that war casts a long shadow.
The trauma psychiatrist asked me: “How many dead bodies have you seen?”
I thought hard, trying to remember events and places; fields of bodies, mass graves, wells with blue corpses stuffed down them, the man in East Timor who washed up in the sewer, the slabs of dead flesh on my daily trips to the morgue in Sarajevo, the soldier in the snow in Chechnya, the miles and miles of dead Rwandans on a road near Goma. Skin stretched purple over bone. Bloated faces. How many? The fact was, I did not know. Dozens? Hundreds?
The psychiatrist was silent as he wrote in his notebook. After a while, he looked up. “Don’t you find that odd?” he said, not unkindly. “Most people only see the bodies of their grandparents, or their parents, and only at their funerals.”
Bright sunshine after a weekend of rain. Broken glass on the main street, lingering tear gas. But women going out to shop, carrying babies on their backs wrapped in shawls, a tractor rumbling down the road en route to vineyards. Small birds darting amongst the cotoneaster berries and the mountains still dusted with snow. Life going on, good, bad, difficult, incalculable.
I read students (particularly in the US) are becoming illiterate about history. It’s not taught well, or maybe it is part of a new generations apathy, I don’t know. My mother was in a child in Europe during WWII, and the stories alone are frightening, never mind have lived it. Perhaps the younger generation has it right…why bother with history. It doesn’t seem to change how people act in the present.
Take care of yourself.
Lou I still feel we need to learn from history — but many don’t. And my parenst and grandparents lived through world wars that shaped them in so many ways.
War does cast a long shadow. I have never seen the dead bodies – other than the type the not so astute psychiatrist described – but I have been profoundly affected by relationships with those who have.
Those of us who have battled with PTSD find it hard to form stable relationships and substance abuse is so often part of that. Such a sad story.
I have not experienced massive death. I think that it must be equally horrific to know that we humans have the capability to cause so much destruction. I remember looking at the Brady photos of the Civil War battlefields. So many young men lying crumpled. Those photos still affect me.
Syd I haven’t see those photos but the deaths of young men in war is often a waste — and then there are civilian deaths and the suffering of children.
i read that article yesterday on my mobile phone while waiting for my friend. i hardly ever read anything in the newspaper (more accurately on its website) so it is quite a coincidence that you mention it today. i too found it moving and bleak. i don’t think it is possible to see the sort of things she describes and remain untouched.
Hi Joker — yes, I also found it moving and bleak, good words. Nobody is unscathed by war, not even the witnesses who can leave and go elsewhere.
Thanks for commenting.
The bombers flew low over the hay fields. But in Ohio, they were “ours”. At age 8-10, I fantasized being shot at by those little sticks pointing out from the sides and front.
We were taught the first war was fought between angels. Imagine!