Long Lost Letters

It is my Father-in-law’s (Blake) birthday.   His father (Bob) is still a very healthy man at 91 and can be seen bicycling around town still.   He also came to the birthday party for his oldest.  I love talking to Bob and try to coax some nugget of information from him about his life each time I see him.

Tonight it was about the book he is trying to get finished/printed.  He typed up 440 pages (in Microsoft word) worth of letters he and his dear departed sweetheart (Jessie) wrote to each other over the course of their courtship and marriage.  I asked him some generic question about it tonight and got an absolute gem of a story.

Bob and Jessie started exchanging letters in 1943, shortly before his service in WWII.  Space was a premium in the Navy and all he had was his seaman’s bag.  But in the bottom of that pack he kept carried all of Jessie’s letters, never discarding them.  He carried them across the US twice, and across the Pacific Ocean and back.  He carried them across a lifetime.

Just a few years before she passed, he and Jessie were in their living room.  She was confined to a wheel chair by then, but he was up and about straightening up a closet.   He pulled from that closet a box that had been pushed into the corner.   He opened it up and found a bundle of letters tied together.  He untied the string and took the first letter out of the box.  He found it dated 1943.  It was the first of the letters Jessie had written to him.  As she sat, he read it to her, like the voice of the past reaching out to touch them that day.

He had forgotten he had those letters.  But he’d kept them safe.  When he finished reading, Jessie told him that, “if you look in that closet over there you’ll find all the letters you wrote to me.”  He said, “I’ve been in that closet a hundred times, there are no letters there.”  But she insisted.  So he went and looked.   In a briefcase in the top of the closet he found another bundle of letters.   Jessie had also kept every letter that Bob had written to her.

He had no idea, and neither did she.  He has no idea how they survived that long without being damaged or thrown out.  He said he isn’t even sure why he had kept her letters.  He had been engaged to a different girl when they started writing and he didn’t keep the letters from that girl.  He hadn’t even kept his own mother’s letters.  But he’d kept Jessie’s.  He’d kept the words of the woman he would eventually marry and love for a lifetime.

And so now that Jessie is gone, he has gone through those letters.  He has put them in order and is publishing them as a genealogical record for his posterity to enjoy.  I’m very much looking forward to reading it!


However, there was one letter he doesn’t have.   There was one particular letter that Jessie wrote that really touched him.  He kept it separate from the others so that he could easily find it and reread it.  But because it was not safely stored with the others in his seaman’s bag, it was thoughtlessly thrown out one day by someone cleaning ship.   He’d kept those other letters for 7 decades, but the one he cherished most was lost???  I wish I could read that one letter most of all…

 

…but perhaps some things are best kept between couples.

“Fencing, fighting, torture, revenge…” You know the rest!

“Fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles…”

Many of you will recognize that as the epic description that “Grandpa” gives before reading “The Princess Bride” to his sick Grandson.  As one of the most quotable movies of all time, it is a fine film that many have thoroughly enjoyed for several decades now.

“As you wish”

Unfortunately, and far less enjoyably, that description also applies to what I experience almost every night when I close my eyes.  My particular experience with PTSD has less to do with my waking hours than it does with my non-waking ones.   There are some manifestations that take place when I’m up and about, but the worst ones are the ones that play out across my synapses while I sleep. I might talk about the causes of my PTSD at a later time, but I’m not up for that right now.  Suffice it to say that I have it.

It is a fact of human biology that we MUST sleep.  And those moments are pure torture for me.  As soon as I close my eyes I’m almost always whisked away and placed in some form of danger.   I’m being held captive somewhere, I’m being tortured, I’m watching people operate on me while I’m ‘awake’, I’m in a house surrounded by people trying to get in to kill me, etc.   Those dreams are pretty bad.  I toss and turn while asleep (also not good with my back), wake in sweaty panics, and just find no rest.

But those aren’t the worst ones.  Part of my PTSD comes from an individual who made some very descriptive threats against my family.  The nightmares where those are played out, or where my brain expands on them, are the worst.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen my wife raped, or a child killed, or been frantically searching for someone who has been taken,  have tried to escape some potential tormentor who is giving chase, or in some other horrendous way watched the mutilation, violation, torture, or deaths of a family member at the hands of some villain (who I occasionally know) that I was unable to stop.  Those nights are the absolute worst, and they come far too often.

I wish there were some better treatment for this.  Since getting here in SLC sometime in November I’ve been regularly seeing someone at the VA.  Supposedly over time things might calm down or stop.  It’s been 8 years since I left the Army though, so I’m not holding my breath.   Other vets have told me that they find some of the more intense therapies very useful, but they usually entail going over the very raw experiences and reliving/retelling them, and I just don’t feel like I’m up to doing that.  Perhaps with time.

For now the best the VA has to offer is medication.   At first they gave me something to relieve my complaint that I couldn’t sleep (I guess I failed to leave out that the nightmares were the reason for that) and so I received a medication that was very good at helping me stay asleep.  But it made it impossible to wake from the nightmares, so that medication was a serious no-go all by itself.

So they added another one to help with the nightmares… except that they don’t have one that affects the actual nightmares.  They give me a blood-pressure medication so that I “will still have the nightmares, but your blood pressure won’t go up so you won’t care about the nightmare.”  So I still have the experiences every night, but the drug tries to take the terror out of it.  How well would your psyche handle that?

My psyche isn’t exactly in pristine condition.  Julie dragged me from the house to a choir/band concert at Caitlin’s middle school (same one Julie attended) a few weeks ago.  We sat in the very back (so I wasn’t surrounded by people) and I went through my regular (though probably not normal) habit of marking exit doors, high traffic areas, persons of note, etc.   I tried to act nonchalant with Julie and asked her if there was an exit at the end of one corridor and then questioning, “I must be turned around, how would I get from that door back to the car?”  I knew where I was, but wanted her to play out the escape path in her mind.  I’m sure she knew I was just being psychotic again.  :/

But if that wasn’t psychotic enough, as I was scanning the crowd and finding exits I suddenly found myself mentally crawling between seats involved in a gunfight with a group of masked attackers.  While everyone else was shuffling in and finding a seat, I was busy returning fire as I tried to push civilians toward some cover, apply pressure to an abdominal wound I took, make my way toward where I thought Caitlin might be on stage, and try to kill some mythical masked SOB with an AK-47.

Of course in real life I was sitting stiffly and starting to hyperventilate about the fact that I was in fact unarmed because I was in a school.  Julie could tell and just helped me breathe.  She takes good care of me like that.   My brain follows that track so frequently while I’m asleep that it easily falls into that pattern when I’m awake sometimes too.

So while the need for sleep is a biological fact of humanity, it is a psychological terror for me that bleeds into my life at inopportune times.   It might sound like a simple phrase, but when I add to our family prayer, “please help us all sleep well” you can understand how selfish a request that is.   I plead for it every night.

I wish upon the rest of you sweet dreams as well.

 

Combat Bill Paying – Live Footage!!

I’ve been wanting to be able to add more content here that wasn’t just text. So I downloaded a free video editing software (Microsoft Movie Maker) and picked the first video I could find on my computer to see how it works.

The video was recorded by my IPhone 4S about 2 months ago.  I didn’t know ahead of time what I wanted to do with it, but after about 15 minutes of playing around this is what I ended up with. (Keep in mind I’ve never done this)

 

I know it is low quality, but I had fun just learning what the basic controls were for video editing.  Of course I didn’t use multiple videos or pics, didn’t edit sound at all (or add any), so I’m sure I can’t even say I learned “the basics”.    But it was interesting none the less.

If you’d like to give me some advice, I would love to hear it.  It can be about software to use, cameras to think about obtaining, sources of knowledge I should look up, or whatever.

Hope you enjoyed the clip!