The View From Here

Here is the part where I tell you that the story so far has just been setting the scene, and now I'm about to turn around and start walking again and take you with me, still on the road out of here but nowhere near any recognizable landmarks. Nowhere near home.

They say it's possible to resolve PTSD with the therapy I'm doing. It feels like it might be. It also feels like whatever resolution that may come won't be coming for a very long time. It took me 20 years to get here. It will take more than a couple of months to get out.

This journey of mine often reminds me of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington DC. Have you been there? I saw it once about 10 years ago, and was completely unprepared for the impact it had on me: it was a deeply visceral experience long before I felt any personal connection to the metaphor it holds.

The wall starts low at each end of a long, sloping walkway, rising up beside it like a curb. It is made of black, reflective stone. You can see yourself reflected in it. I think this is part of the point.

The top of the wall remains level, while the walkway angles downward, bringing you inexorably lower, the black slab rising higher, higher, to your waist, your shoulder, above your head, beyond your reach on tiptoe. The walkway pulls you into the blackness, leading you downward, not letting up.

Printed on the wall, of course, are the names of the fallen. They are listed chronologically by year, so you can see quite literally how the violence progressed from relatively few casualties at the beginning of the conflict to thousands of lives lost in the thick of it. And it just keeps coming. The wall gets taller, begins to dwarf you as you move. And you keep walking, down, down, into the black, and that list of names keeps getting longer, and by the time you get to 1968 you're drowning in it, drowning in death and loss and helpless to stop it.

And then you reach the lowest point of the walkway, with the top of the black wall 10 feet above and the names piled on top of each other out of sight, and you notice that you've turned a corner, the ground has tilted upward and you're headed back to the light, and that's where everything shifts to a new kind of horror. 

Because even though you know, from your safe perspective, that the tide had turned on the war and the deescalation had begun, the names don't stop coming. And you still have to walk past them, all those lost lives, those sons and fathers and brothers and lovers, those men who died and kept on dying even though the course of the war had changed.

You have to keep walking and watch their deaths mark the time. They trickle off slowly,  sickeningly symmetrical to the way they began, but by this time it's really sunk in that each name was a life, a world, a family destroyed. Each name is one too many. Each name is more unbearable than the last, until finally, finally, the top of the wall is once again at your neck, your elbow, your knee, and then, at last, level with the walkway.

I was shocked at how strongly I responded to the Memorial. It remains one of the most vivid, commanding works of art I've ever seen, and I've seen some art in my time. It's also a profoundly moving depiction of the tragedy and horror of war. If you find yourself in DC and need a shortlist of sites to visit, the Vietnam Memorial belongs on that list to the exclusion of many other things that might seem more important. 

They're not.

Anyway. If it doesn't do too much dishonor to the Memorial to say it, I feel like I'm on that walkway in my own head. I have the sense of standing at the lowest point, the point where downward movement has finally, almost imperceptibly ended and the upward slope has not yet begun; the place where you are most aware not only of how far you've come but also of how very far you have yet to go and how much more you'll have to endure along the way.

Recovery of this kind doesn't always feel like a blessing. It feels a lot more like you've just been robbed of the ability to ignore your own suffering. And being newly aware of it doesn't make it recede. You still have to get up and walk yourself out of the hole, only now you can see, in stark relief, the losses that continue to mount as you go.

I told my husband the other day that it's like being handed a flashlight to light my way and finding out I've been sitting in a closet all this time. At this point, the only difference is that now I can see the walls.

"Being able to see the walls is the biggest change there is," he said. "That means that for the first time ever, you know where you are."

He's a wise man, my husband. And he's right. No matter what else, I know where I am now. It's not where I want to be. And for the first time, I'm confident that what I am doing will, eventually, get me where I want to go.

I just have to keep reminding myself of that simple fact as I begin to put one foot in front of the other, here at the bottom of things, and take my first uncertain steps up the slope, heading out of the darkness and back to the light.