I was having a discussion with someone very dear to me tonight. We started discussing… well, crying. I posted this on another site in Feb 2011. I felt I needed to share this again, on G+. It’s a long read, and I can’t promise you won’t cry. If you make it through, you’ll learn a bit more about me.
Here it is in it’s entirety, unedited, just as I posted it before.
____________________
Ok, first things first: Mom, Megan, Meredith… You should stop reading now. Really.
Now that we’ve got that out of the way…
I recently got involved with a group at work called the VetNet. It’s primarily for Veterans of the armed forces, but also their families and just supporters. While I never served in the military, I was born into the Army and did a short stint contracting with the Navy. So just by way of my Dad, I’ve been connected with the military for most of my life.
Today the VetNet had a screening of Restrepo followed by a panel consisting of Sebastion Junger, Tim Hetherington and two employees who also served in the Military. One of them is a Marine who returned from 8 months in Afghanistan today. The movie is a fascinating documentary. Sebastian and Tim are journalists who embedded themselves with a platoon in Afghanistan. Outpost Restrepo was named for a fallen comrade and was a 15 man outpost in the Korengal Valley, also known as the most dangerous place on earth.
Now the movie doesn’t go into any politics. There is no right or wrong. It’s simply a snapshot in time of what these soldiers were going through.
The discussion panel afterwards was particularly interesting to me, though. They spoke about the relationships of all the men, things they went through when they came back and anything else that the audience cared to ask. One story that Sebastian relayed was from a woman who had come to a screening. Her husband had come back from Afghanistan a while before, and was suffering the stress of his tour of duty. She tried to reach out to him. She’d ask about what was going on and he wouldn’t speak about it. Eventually the stress ended up destroying the marriage. They got divorced and went their separate ways. Once she saw the movie, she got a glimpse of what his time had been there, and said that if she had really known that, even just the glimpse of what he went through, they would probably still be married.
Most people have heard of PTSD or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Sebastian had a different reaction. He wasn’t alone either. He spoke of how his outlook on life had changed, and how sometimes the littlest thing would start to make him cry. Things like weddings would make him water up. Sometimes it was just seeing someone and their child walking down the street together. Occasionally he would wake up in the middle of the night just sobbing uncontrollably, and he couldn’t explain why. A few others he knew had similar reactions. It was really strange. They were all wondering “Why are we all turning into GIRLS?!?” These men, the toughest of the tough, really weren’t the same.
On the road he was sharing these same experiences at book signings and movie screenings. After one of the talks, a psychologist approached him and said “You know, there’s a clinical term for these feelings you’re having. It’s called Post Traumatic Growth.”
There are many causes according to this doctor, including stressful situations like war, near death experiences, or just very traumatic life changes like the one that rang true with me:
The loss of a parent.
Ok, Meredith, I know you’re still reading. It’s not too late to walk away. At least go and get a box of kleenex. We’ll wait.
I had never heard about PTG before this, and I don’t want to be one of those people that comes down with every condition I’ve ever heard but this one was different.
As many of you know, my father passed away a little over three and a half years ago from Melanoma. As soon as I found out, after the initial shock, I started looking for what I could do. I signed up to run the Livestrong Challenge in San Jose and started fundraising. The amount of times I had ever done any fundraising before this? A cumulative total of zero. Seriously, I was the guy who stayed a Life Scout instead of getting my Eagle Scout ranking because I didn’t want to do the community service. Since my Dad’s diagnosis and passing, I’ve raised nearly $10k for Cancer research. I haven’t yet signed up this year, but most likely I’ll continue the trend somehow. This wasn’t exactly my standard modus operandi.
I had just recently started running before he was diagnosed and I’m glad to say he got to see me finish my first Marathon. I think the running helped keep me sane, and that summer I was in the best shape of my life. For a lazy tech geek/musician, this was also not the norm.
I think no one would blame me when I say that I cried when he was diagnosed, and of course I cried when he passed away. Like so many men, especially those of us raised in the military, I hadn’t cried in probably twenty years before that. It just wasn’t in my nature. Through most of my teenage years, I’d say I only cried when I hurt myself somehow, and then only when there was visible blood or broken bones. In my twenties, I got poked with a sharp stick til my spleen popped through my abdominal wall. I shoved it back in with my finger, slapped some duct tape on it and moved on. No tears. There may be a small amount of exaggeration in that paragraph, but you get the point.
Well, after my Dad passed away, that changed. I distinctly remember watching the movie “The Invention of Lying” on a plane. It was an excellent movie, which really surprised me. (Meredith, DO NOT watch it.) In the movie, Ricky Gervais becomes the first man ever to lie in the world. First it’s to his friends, then to women, and he ends up basically creating religion when his mother was on her deathbed. He told her there was a better place waiting for her on the other side.
Religious beliefs aside, there I was on the plane. A thirty five year old man on a plane. And I was crying.
Just a little. My eyes welled up. I tried to hide it, and wondered what was going on. This totally wasn’t me. And it wasn’t the last time. Seriously, chick flicks kind of get to me now. It’s really sad. The truth is though, that when I see things like weddings, even in movies, I think of how my Dad won’t be at mine. And how he won’t know my kids. And yeah, it gets to me. To this day, I don’t get why all flights have chick flicks on them. It’s really embarrassing.
So now, today I had this realization. The mention of PTG makes sense. Since my father’s passing, I’ve actually become a more athletic, more caring, more giving person than I was when he was here. And while my Father really did make me everything I am today, he made me even better when he left. Which frankly, gets to me because he’s not here to see it. I know he was proud of me then, and I’m sure he’d be even more so now.
And yeah, I just started crying.
It’s just like my Dad, too. His entire life was about things bigger than just him. Whether it was the military, or Rotary club, or even People to People, everything he did, he did to make the world a better place than it was when he got here. I suppose it’s only fitting that the last thing he did was to make me into a better man than I was before.
A Pun Involving Travel 