I burned my ‘What If’ packet. I developed it while on active duty and held onto it until very recently. It was a collection of documents and ephemera to be distributed upon my death, one I assumed would happen in combat, though I conducted many high-risk training evolutions. I created it both to prepare myself for the unthinkable and blunt my passing with my loved ones. I even designated someone to escort my body home, assuming he himself wasn’t dead or wounded. It may have been wishful thinking in all cases.
Assembled in 2009 and updated over subsequent years, the packet contained letters to my family and friends, my will and testament, details for my funeral to include naming my pallbearers and the hymns I wanted sung. The latter were more for the attendees since I like music and figured we could enjoy them again together, along with $5K to put behind the bar at my wake. I do enjoy a drink with friends.
Inside the packet were detailed instructions to an executor of sorts—a close friend whom I’ve thanked many times—who would manage my personal affairs outside of the Marine Casualty Assistance Call Officer, including inventorying my personal effects and act as a bouncer and protector to my family so they could focus on the task at hand.
Keeping that packet current created an emotional burden over time, but I again kept in mind it was for the living, not for me. Still, it was a selfish bit of closure on my part, if only to die with a clean conscience. The packet didn’t include a eulogy—talk about believing your own press! I had to hope the person I designated to create one (a strong and stoic family member) would do so and solemnly deliver it, whatever he thought of me. It’s the best one can ask for, I suppose.
The letters were the hardest to write and I deliberately didn’t open the packet to read them. In fact, I left the packet sealed as I’d intended. In writing those missives I was recording my own pain and misgivings, in many ways trying to blunt my own Post-Traumatic Stress (PTS) I’d incurred to that moment.
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Living with PTS was hard while I was in the Marine Corps and my ‘what if’ packet meant I would pass some of that on to my loved ones while paradoxically creating PTS for each of them through my death. I didn’t put a question mark at the end of it; there was no point since the packet indicated finality. The questions would continue anew through the people who read my letters to them.
A writer I subscribe to on Substack, Whitney the Trauma Survivor, is chronicling her own PTS journey. She is a victim of sexual assault and violence and is trying to navigate her own experience in a vulnerable and public way. Her newsletter is raw and difficult to read at times.
I admire her courage and bravery to share such intimate details of her life, and one passage she recently published resonated with me. I quote it here out of respect for her and, per my article last week, to illustrate PTS is not exclusive to the military veteran community, though the tenants of PTS are the same however it manifests.
I haven’t been sleeping well the last few days.
It’s the kind of tired that goes beyond physical exhaustion—it’s nervous system deep. My body is wired and weary at the same time. Like my brain is trying to outrun something, even in the dark, even in dreams.
This is PTS[D]—My brackets, I recommend we drop the ‘D’. This is what it looks like sometimes when the world slows down and my body speeds up. It’s not always triggered by a clear event—sometimes it’s the weather shifting, or a certain smell in the air, or just the season that my body remembers before I do.
My own PTS is suppressed in the interest of better public interaction, but like Whitney, I can be transported by a sound or smell, and just looking at the packet brought on a flood of memories and awfulizing which ended in rumination about the life I’ve lived and am allowed to continue living. So, too was my experience holding my “What If” packet standing in front of a fire deciding whether or not to let the flames consume it.
How many fires had I stood in front of while deployed, contemplating life, killing time, and wondering about any number of things to include my family? My mind swirled with memories, matching the dancing of the ever-changing flames.
I considered the packet a little longer, then unceremoniously tossed it into the fire, resisting the urge to reach into the inferno to retrieve it. No, this was it.
I burned it because I want to live my life in the present and have conversations with people about who I am and what made me; I no longer feel the need to have a piece of who I was for people I cared about to hold onto. I made it through war and violence without having to address ‘What If’ and it was time to divorce that part of my past. More importantly, I needed to get to know the people to whom I wrote. They’d lived through my own experiences with separate perspectives and feelings, often without expressing their own opinions on the matter.
Like Whitney, I don’t sleep well. When I do, it’s deep, but it’s rare; something is always rattling in my psyche and tied to my heart which creates a physical ache that can’t be abated with Advil. No, it’s a holistic feeling of despair across my body’s meridians. Oh, to feel the peace of naivety. Like all experiences, one can’t go back, only forward, and that isn’t the same as moving on.
For those of us dealing with PTS, we must acknowledge that the circumstances which lead to the trauma were largely out of our control. We must accept that what happened to us wasn’t our fault. We must not let our past define us, even as we reconcile our choices. As I did with my ‘What If’ packet, we must each look into the fire to decide which part of the past we wish to part with since that is an individual reconciliation.
Healing takes time, and we must allow ourselves some grace to no longer focus on, ‘What If.’
