We sleep soundly because of men ready for violence

"We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm."

- Winston Churchill

I Am Broken Now - My Life Post Deployment

A Glimpse Into One Spouse's Life Post Deployment

I've heard this a number of times. When deployed soldiers are asked how they feel, when they know combat is imminent, they answer matter-oh-factly, "I was planning on dying." I think it is the way that they can keep going through it, and not let fear paralyze them. They don't plan to come home. They don't/can't imagine a life beyond the deployment while they're in it. Ask them. The deployment is all there is until the bullet or IED takes you. ... 

The strange thing is, that in a distant remote way, I get this. Even though I talked about my husband coming home. Even though if asked I would have said confidently, "He's coming home." ... Deep down, I believed that every goodbye was the last one. Every email was the last one. Every phonecall was the last one. ... After a time, that messes with you. You get broken. 

I grieved the loss of my husband even when he wasn't dead. I grieved alone. Who would understand my grieving the living? I didn't even understand it. But it was real and it happened and something inside of me broke. Like losing a finger or an arm, I'm missing something and it won't grow back. I don't understand it. I'm learning to live with it now. 

My husband will attest to the fact that I still believed I was going to lose him even after he came home. I had a very difficult time saying goodbye so he could go to work for the day (for months), because it was "the last time" all over again. Drill weekends were another exercise in anxiety and depression. There were days I paced back and forth in our living room because I didn't know what else to do. I wondered if perhaps I was losing it. Perhaps I had. 

I have finally begun to understand that something in me broke and I can't just go back or "find" what used to be again. I have accepted this, but wonder if there is another side, if one day I will come through, if this brokenness, this empty feeling inside will eventually fade. I still struggle to connect with my husband. I still find myself thinking of a future without him, even though I love him and want to spend the rest of my life with him. I struggle with being too independent. 

But perhaps the hardest thing is that, few other people can understand. Who "plans" on their husband dying. Who understands grieving a living person? It doesn't make sense. It's not logical. But, for some of us who send our husbands away, that is what deep down we have accepted. They will not be coming home and we will survive. And, at least for me, it wrought changes in me that I could not have foreseen, nor fully understand today.