February | 2016 | Caring for My Veteran

I realized that I have always been the one to love the “little” things. Those small tokens given to me by friends and loved ones are the ones I hold dear. Not the obligatory Christmas, birthday, or Valentines gifts. No, it’s the ones that come “just because”. Those are the ones I cling to. The ones I find tucked away in a drawer or a box after I’ve forgotten about them. But I never throw them away.

I have a tiny crocheted bear that was given to me by a very close friend when I was in 9th grade. I found it again a few years back when I was going through my boxes I had all my England stuff in. I have notes from friends we passed back and forth to each other in school. I even have a silly little piece of paper with a “I love you” note from TheHubs from when we first got married tucked away in a binder I used to carry. I have a 3×5 card from him that he wrote telling me not to worry because I will be home soon. I have it pinned to my cube wall. Another note on my wall is from my son when he was 5 and a poem he wrote me when he was 7.

It’s always the small things that mean so much!

A few years back I was cleaning out the mess beneath my bathroom sink. But when I pulled out my basket of hair stuff, I found a card my husband had given me, I don’t know when. I just sat there on the floor of the bathroom, reading and feeling the love. Now I carry it around in my bag to work so when I need a reminder, I just pull it out and smile.

My husband is not much of a wordsmith. I know that. But sometimes just the simplest of words can really hit me in all the feels!

Yup, you guessed it, it made me cry.

Of course I told TheHubs I found it and what it said. And of course, he said, “Absolutely true. I will never regret asking you. I love you.”

Then, a few days, maybe a week later, TheHubs showed me a video on YouTube. I’ve heard the song before and really like it. But TheHubs hadn’t heard it before. He said he heard it on the way to taking TheBoy to school and he thought of me and it made him cry. It was how he felt about me.

Again, the tears flowed again.

But all these tears are happy tears. They are the little things that mean so much to the heart and to the soul. They are the positives we all need to find in our own lives. I am so glad to have found them and to share them with you. Because I know, if I share them, someone out there will be thinking about their own little pieces of positive. ❤

I wrote this letter to John Legend thanking him for his song, All of Me, around out 25th Anniversary. However, I do not know how to get it to him. I tried to win his Valentine’s Day Sweepstakes he had last year where he auctioned off a chance to have him sing at your wedding. While it would not have been our “wedding,” we have always wanted to renew our vows on our 25th. With our life, his pain, and always the lack of money, we never got a chance to have our vows renewed and had a honeymoon. I would have so loved for Mr. Legend to sing this for us. But I am so happy for the lovely couple who did win it. If you have the time, click-through to watch the video. It was just beautiful!

I do hope that one day he WILL read it and understand the depth of the impact that song had on us.

Dear Mr. John Legend,

I wanted to take the time to write you a letter regarding your song, All Of Me. I’m sure you’ve heard many a story about this song and how it is so incredibly perfect; but I’d like to share with you my story and how it has impacted my life.

The first time my husband heard your song, really listened to it, was right after he dropped our son off at the school bus stop. He told me he sat there, parked, with tears streaming down his face. When he told me this, it brought tears to my eyes.

Our story is much like a fairy tale, at least in the beginning, maybe even now but in a different from normal way. It’s not really love at first sight so much as two souls, destined to be together, finally finding one another and holding on. Five days after we met, he asked me to marry him. A month later we were married. December 22^nd we celebrated our 25^thanniversary. We’ve beaten so many odds, so many things that would have torn even the best couples apart, to get where we are today.

I’ve been paranoid since day one that he’d leave me. Because my father was in the Air Force and we moved around every four years, it’s been difficult to keep relationships – friendships and boyfriends. They either failed after a period of time or they disappeared into the wind. And because my upbringing has shaped my view of myself, I’ve always blamed myself for their failing. For me, it’s been hard to accept that he would be around so long. To this day I still have sad dreams where he leaves me. I never truly understood just how much he loves me.

My husband is also a disabled veteran who suffers chronic migraines, chronic neck pain, PTSD, and TBI. Before we had the diagnoses, before we had it managed, we didn’t know how to communicate. I think being a man is hard enough when our boys are raised not to show emotion. It’s a sign of weakness. But to be a soldier and to have emotional issues is a hundred times worse. They tell the soldiers to “Buck up. Charge on. Embrace the suck. Deal with it. Get over it.” But they never tell them how. They are left broken, not only on the outside, but on the inside as well. So when all these emotions, all these fears, and nightmares manifested inside him, things didn’t go well in our house. It didn’t help not knowing what the problem was and all the medication and medication changes really messed up his brain chemistry, too. He never knew how to tell me what was going on in his mind. Most of the time it came out through anger – not at me; but I always managed to feel it was my fault. He never knew how to express himself without saying something wrong. So he kept it all bottled up inside him. Silence killed me. I always imagined the worst. But I loved him. That’s all I could do.

It wasn’t until he sought help that he started learning how to express himself and communicate. In his learning he began teaching me. That was about five years ago. He has opened up to me about what has happened. I doubt I will know everything. But it doesn’t matter. We are communicating and learning. It is a never-ending education. One in which we both must practice.

I think the last two years have been incredibly hard. There was a time my husband rationalized. Because he always feels he is a burden, because his depression has affected me and our son greatly, he felt that I’d be better off without him. He didn’t tell me this at first. I had no idea. We were going through another medication change and I just thought it was his body adjusting to it. I never saw any signs. He wore his mask well. He only told me about it after his epiphany and after he spoke to his doctor about it.

Honestly, it scared me. But I was grateful he didn’t follow through. Lord knows we have enough medication at his fingertips that it would have been so easy for him. But he didn’t. And for that I thank God.

I thought I buried it so I could move on and continue doing what I always did. However, it must have hidden in the darkest of shadows, poking at my subconscious, taunting me because by Christmas 2013, I had fallen into my own dark abyss with no light to guide me through. I thought I was alone, that no one would understand what I deal with on a daily basis. To look at my husband is to look at anyone. He’s even had someone remark in a snide way, “Well, you don’t look disabled.” You cannot imagine how deep this cut him. But he put on a smile, a mask, and said, “Thank you.” To this day, it still eats at him. As for me, when I have had to decline invitations to social gatherings, and explain that we cannot come because of my husband, potential friends’ eyes would glass over in complete incomprehension. After a while, we lost all our friends, and any potentially new ones would stop asking. We were alone. I was alone.

I’ve tried to live my life as positively as possible. I learned to surround myself with positive people and cut out the negatives during my husband’s Kosovo deployment in 1999. I’ve always wanted to help other people find their own positives when I was growing up and I’ve also tried to share that with people on my blog. However, it wasn’t until last year that I realized I need to cut out my inner negative in order to keep my positive life going. Three years ago I came up with the phrase, “Find the positives, no matter how small, in every situation.” I tried to hold on to that when I fell into my pit last year; but the demons screamed louder and blackened the light.

By the time I couldn’t stop crying, I knew I had to seek help. I researched and found a group of military/veteran caregivers and took a chance at their Caring for the Caregiver seminar. It was definitely and eye opener and set me on my path to recovery. My year of healing began January 2013 and will continue the rest of my life. Now, a year later, because I took the time to heal, I can now help my family again.

Being positive is one of the hardest things to do, especially in the face of hopelessness. To me, though, it is the only way to get through life. I love your positivity you exude in your work and your life. You truly are an inspiration. Your release of All of Me hit it big on my 45^th birthday. I believe it was a message.

While you wrote that song for your wife, you’ve given my husband a voice to express his feelings for me. While I never truly comprehended the depth of his love, 25 years later, I am starting to understand. Every time your song plays, he tries so hard to sing along. He grabs my hand when I’m near, looks at me when I’m not so near. His eyes glisten and his lips tremble. Most times a single tear will fall. My heart is filled with so much love. I still don’t quite understand, but maybe I’m not supposed to. Maybe I’m just supposed to accept that he loves me so deeply, that we were meant to be together until the end of time, that we are two halves of a single soul merged together forever.

Last week, my husband was sitting on the edge of the bed, listening to your song again and he cried. I hugged him and cried with him. And then he told me that he tried so hard, and for so long to memorize that song for me so he could sing it to me at our 25^th anniversary dinner. His traumatic brain injuries and PTSD make it near impossible to commit things to memory anymore. It frustrates him to no end. But this, this just made him sad and angry. He just couldn’t remember the words. Not only that, he couldn’t get past the first verse before he started crying again.

Because we got married so quickly, because we didn’t know each other well when we did get married, and because the military has kept up hopping around since, we didn’t have a honeymoon let alone an “our song.” Now, 25 years later, with the greatest of thanks to you and the love you have for your wife, as well as your gift of poetry and song, All of Me is now our song.

From my heart to yours, thank you.

Several weeks ago, my husband called me while I was at work.
Nothing unusual about that.

However, this time his voice was broken and quiet and he said, “Something happened.”

My mind raced within a microsecond of what could possibly have happened. My throat closed. My stomach flipped.

Before the sobs took hold and the line went dead, he managed to tell me of the memory that the fog had shrouded from him since the incident happened in Kosovo back in 1999.

My own silent panic raged inside of me while I dropped everything at work and sped home. He was no longer answering the phone. The more I tried, the faster I drove. Even if we had someone who could go check on him, I knew he was in no state to answer the door. Had I called 911 and had a sheriff go out, it probably could have made things a thousand times worse. I just had to get home as fast as I could.

I already had a plan in my head if I were to get pulled over by the police for speeding. I would have handed them my driver’s license and told them to meet me at my house because my husband was in full PTSD meltdown and I needed to get there as fast as I could. (Honestly, in hindsight, I probably should have called 911 to let them know what I was doing. Not sure how that would have ended though. Would they have come to the house? Would it have made TheHubs worse?)

Once I got home, I found him huddled under the covers, won’t come out from under them. I called his VA doctor and between me talking with him and the nurse talking with him while I held the phone to his ear, we finally calmed him down.

But that memory of his time in Kosovo, that memory that his brain had protected him from, still lingers.

PTSD never gets better. No amount of therapy or drugs can make it so. I don’t care what the VA says. PTSD is something that will haunt the person for the rest of their lives. They, alone, are the only ones who can manage it. Living with someone who suffers PTSD is not so haunting, but it does affect everyone it touches in some way. Those of us who live with, and love, someone who suffers with these demons has to learn to adjust. And the only way to learn is through communication between everyone involved.

I am blessed that he is comfortable enough, trusts me enough, to share with me his demons. But I am also cursed with the knowledge of those demons and knowing that I will never be able to take them from him.

LadyJai

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