So it’s that time of year again, the social media sites are all abuzz with hundreds of 9/11 images, pictures, discussions, etc. Each and everyone claiming to “never forget.” I refused to participate. My Facebook page both public and private remained void in what many would see as unpatriotic or just plain cold. How un-American can I be?!
However, my heart aches today like many others do and just like them it’s an ache that sometimes ebbs, but never goes away. On September 11th 2001 I was just over a year out of high school. I was in my first semester of college. I was living in my first apartment with my son learning the ropes of parenting a toddler while attempting to discover who I was. I remember my disbelief when my favorite morning DJs first made mention of it. I cut my shower short and ran to the TV, back then I believed in cable, and I slumped in horror at the smoke. There was a plane sticking out of the World Trade Center. Our generation’s very own Pearl Harbor. The images and story unfolding would cover the news for weeks and as a nation we declared war.
In a small town on the other side of the country a young man like so many others would be drawn into the Army over these same events. There was no draft, no “ask what you can do for your country” speech, yet these men, these boys, felt a sense of duty, a call to fight back, to defend, inspired by sassy country songs and a need to regain control they enlisted enmass. This one man would have seen combat before I would ever know his smile. He matured in ways I could only imagine before his last name became mine. He was a soldier to the core and I never wanted that life, but I loved him anyway.
The fighting continued in lands across the globe, spurred by the act of terrorists on this day 12 years ago. My soldier like many others would return to those lands again and again. Like so many of our troops he spent more time sleeping in a connex fashioned to a room than he would ever spend in our bed. He has seen too many firefights to count and awakes to horrors he can’t bare to put into words. We have created a generation of men who now have the labels PTSD or TBI. We have buried far too many. The struggles of living a life of 12 months gone and fewer home have broken families that otherwise would have made it. There are so many people who feel the pain and loss everyday; they ache for the son’s who never returned, the brothers who are broken, and the husbands who are shells of their former selves whose wounds remain unseen.
On one day; the anniversary of one of the most tragic events on US soil you can look around and see your feed is alive with hundreds of people who “never forget” only for those of us who carry the burden that comes from the chain of events of that day it feels as though those are the people who only remember today b/c those of us suffering in silence never truly forget…
