Anyone who has known me five minutes probably knows that I wear my emotions on my sleeves. I cry at ribbon cuttings. Just a passing thought will bring a lump to my throat. Even when I was a teenager when we would play a card game that I later would come to know as liar's poker, I always lost big. Friends would always say I could neither lie nor hide my feelings.
Today is Veterans Day. Since coming to Washington, I've made it a practice to walk around the Tidal Basin, visiting each of the memorials to one war or another. Once I went to another part of town to see a memorial to African-American soldiers who fought in the Civil War, 250,000 or so of them, as I recall. That lump in my throat has always been a constant, and sometimes tears fill my eyes, rolling down my cheeks.
I cannot visit the World War II memorial without thinking about the toll that war took on my father. The World War I memorial, a very simple one which is easy to miss, reminds me of both my grandfathers, who went away as boys. They came home as men, one of them badly broken by what we would call Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD) now. Shell shock was the term used then. Just the distant sight of the Vietnam War Memorial wall brings to mind a friend in my high school car pool, who was killed shortly after arriving in Vietnam.
I don't really know why I am so emotional, but if I were to guess, I think it is a deep sense of loss, not only of lives nipped so young, but of the loss of a very human part of those who did return. Unlike me with my emotions on my sleeves, many of them cannot find that vital part of themselves. Others, like my dad, can only find that part of themselves when they withdraw from family members and spend time with other veterans.
My day started when I heard about London's recognition of the 888,246 people from Britain and her colonies who died during World War I. I was predisposed to feel tears roll down my cheeks as I looked at 888,246 ceramic poppies filling the "moat" of the Tower of London, one for each life lost in the "war to end all wars." (http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/07/world/europe/tower-of-london-poppies/index.html?hpt=wo_c2)
Since I am still getting around stiffly, my annual walk around the Tidal Basin wasn't an option this year. My friend, who has joined me before on the memorial walk, joined me instead for a visit to Washington's Newseum. Although I was feeling a pang of guilt at not doing something more "veteransy," it ended up that the Universe had other ideas. We were going for a photo exhibit, but then we wandered around parts of the museum we hadn't seen before.
Coincident to the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, we spent quite a bit a time at the Berlin Wall exhibit. A rather large (maybe 25 to 30 feet long by about a dozen feet tall) piece of the Wall, covered with graffiti on one side and stark concrete on the other, mirrored the marked differences in life on the two sides of the Wall before it fell. A guard station towered over the segment of the wall. What was really moving, though, were pictures and video clips about that time in the Cold War when the world was torn apart by a war of words, wills, and walls.
I choked, thinking about a friend who was from Germany. We were in Graduate School at the time the Wall fell. She couldn't believe the fall.
In a video interview with a man, who had been a guard in the American Sector of Berlin, told of a young East German man who had been shot and lay screaming for help just a few feet away. I was reminded that this was a war with casualties, just as all those wars honored with memorials on the mall. As I watched the videos of families, torn apart because they lived in different parts of a single city, flood through the Wall, I couldn't help but think about similar reunions at the end of "real" wars. More lumps in my throat.
The Universe had conspired to keep me in the reflective state of heart and mind that my walk around the memorials usually produced. There was no way, however, that I could have guessed the exhibit that would move me the most. It is an exhibit that many Americans would find moving, but I am certain I had a somewhat different experience. The part of the museum that really choked me up was the one that was dedicated to the onset of the "War on Terror"-- the 9/11 exhibit.
You see, on September 10, 2001, I went into my usual fall silent retreat. While I'd usually done that at home, I had the opportunity to use a rural retreat center about 25 miles from my home. Since the center was usually used only on the weekends, I was there alone. When I headed home in the late afternoon on the 13th, I turned on the radio news, expecting the usual fare.
What I heard was far from a standard newscast. Many disjointed stories that made no sense to me. Something had obviously happened, but after two days of the normal news cycle, the assumption built into every story was that everyone on the planet must know what I did not. I was still confused when I finally arrived home 30 minutes later, so I flipped on the TV to see if I could learn more. It was a full year during anniversary of 9/11 that I finally saw pictures of the plane flying into the World Trade Center.
Only today did the full impact of those events reach me...and touch me. I literally had no idea. It truly was war. I bit my lip to keep from turning into a puddle right in the museum.
After my friend went her way, I sat in the sun for a long while just reflecting, thinking about the "regular" war memorials and pondering the salutes to the less conventional. For several hours, my emotions took me to a deep soulful place.
Sometimes the lump in my throat is embarrassing. I have wished that I didn't tear up so easily. But those same emotions are what make me really human and connect me with people across time and space. I can be with my father in northern Africa, France and Italy, long after he is gone. I am with my grandfathers in trenches in France a century ago. Today, I was with people in Berlin racing through the Wall and a teenage girl, looking for her dad, missing after 9/11. This evening I connected with a Medal of Honor winner, whose own eyes filled with tears, during the Concert for Valor
Today, I love my emotions...and the places they take me.
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