The sun isn’t up yet as I enter these words onto my keyboard on Remembrance Day. The day is meant as a time of reflection. Though I had issues with my father who was anything but a good father, I do recognise that life hadn’t dealt him a fair hand either. He was a child in the dirty thirties, found himself a father when he was only eighteen when he joined the military to take part in the Korean War. He was injured there but thankfully survived and returned home. He was a wounded warrior in many ways.
Those wounds coloured the remainder of his life. Why did he go to war when there was a child at home and another on the way? Only he knew, if even he knew. Before he died in a veterans’ hospital, we had reconciled. My anger had been spent and I felt nothing but sadness for what we had both lost over the years. He was my father and I loved him just because of that. And I know, in his own way, he loved me as well.
Being wounded by life seems to be a natural condition. We don’t need wars to be wounded. The effect on the human psyche is the same whether the wounds are physical or mental. Everyone is wounded, though not all know this. The wounding begins not long after birth, a necessary wounding so that a dependent baby eventually becomes an independent adult. Have you ever wondered why those who appear to have everything going for them – a good family, education, wealth, health, and the respect and love of others – why they suffer? It doesn’t make sense that these golden people get divorced, become alcoholics and/or drug addicts, and sink into the darker regions.
Survival is what counts first, when one has been wounded. How one survives ranks second. Surviving comes first. Once physical survival has been achieved, the how becomes a series of choices one makes consciously or unconsciously over the rest of one’s life. Even “floating in the wind” rather than controlling to some degree the choices with which one is faced, is a choice. For some, such as myself, naturism was a choice, a choice that pulled me away from the brink of self-annihilation.
Like I said earlier, the first task is to survive, and yes, my survival was at risk. My wife, my children, and my grandchildren are glad that I chose life, a choice that I had to make a number of times over the decades from adolescence on. I imagine that others are also glad. Though it might not be evident to a person on the brink of extinction, one is never alone. Every survival has its impact, every death has its impact. Not all have a choice when it comes to surviving. Death on a battlefield, in a car, in a fire, etc., doesn’t exactly provide one with a choice.
However, if “will” allows for the choice between surviving or not, the choice to survive is a monumental task in itself. That task remains constant for those who have suffered the most. The will to survive despite one’s wounds are what heroes are made of. For all of his brokenness, my father was a hero.