Reflections on Memorial Day and Grief Recovery

As it’s been Memorial Day this week, I’ve been thinking a lot about my two handsome and good grandfathers who were both veterans of World War II. I can’t fathom how difficult that service was for them and for everyone serving with them in that Greatest Generation and really all veterans — losing friends from home, losing brothers side by side in the fight, experiencing homesickness and terror, losing their innocence at a young age to the horrors of war, having to be heroes in such a difficult way.  

So much grief.

Memorial Day and grief go hand-in-hand. 

Back then, they didn’t talk about trauma, PTSD, and grief. Mental and emotional health were not conversations.  They just had to man up, do their duty, and carry on.  It’s only been very recently that mental health conversations began to lose their stigma. My own grandpas rarely talked about their service.  I’m sure it was too painful to dig up memories and stories they had long buried for self-preservation. 

I feel so much compassion for them when I think about what must have been going on inside that they never let out. They handled it with grace and quiet fortitude, and I am thankful that they were able to do that and that these wonderful men were able to both be a source of joy, love, and wisdom in my own life. And at the same time, my heart breaks when I think about the emotional burdens they carried alone. I’m sad to think of the stories and memories that died with them because they were too painful to share and let out into the light.

I have a friend whose father passed away several years ago. He, too, was a veteran of World War II. As my friend and her family were cleaning out her father’s home after his death, she found a trunk up on a top shelf of an outside toolshed.  Inside the trunk were photos, letters, documents, and mementos from her father’s youth, including his time as a serviceman. She had no idea this was all there in the shed, and she was stunned to find such a trove of her father’s memories. My friend found impressive things about his war service that he never spoke of, love letters to her mother that made her blush. She found so many things that she would have loved to ask him about. So much of him was locked up in that trunk. So much that she would never be able to know now.

Talking about our emotional pain is not easy. It seems like it would be easier to bury it and never talk about it. But we don’t get to bury it and walk away. We carry it with us. It weighs us down and festers inside. Grief Recovery lets you process emotional pain and let it go. When we process the emotion, our memories aren’t so heavy to carry. They are easier to talk about and easier to share. Grief recovery doesn’t mean forgetting. It means that we can remember without so much pain. Don’t pack your memories away in a trunk to be lost to the ages. Everyone has a story to tell. Your story has value — even, and maybe especially even the hard parts of your story. Your story deserves to be heard.