Meditation

11 November 2006 - Veteran’s Day

Merely writing at the top of this page that today is Veteran’s Day invites images of the two veterans I know best – my dad, and my friend, Steve. They are veterans of two very different wars. One from World War II, and the other from Vietnam. Yet, the images I hold are oddly similar. I hold images of both of them as young men, as very fit, and at times as very frightened. I also hold the image that they both endured.

Maybe this is the better word than “survivor” – an endurer. Sounds somehow stronger, less victim-like. Even victorious in a peculiar way.

Yes, endurer is a better word, I believe. It is more active, more choiceful. Endurance is worked at – each day, each minute, each step forward, every step back. Every time we fall down and pick ourselves up again. All part of a regimen, the work of building endurance. I also like the fact that endurance doesn’t just occur. Rather, it is built. I like the scaffold and frame of it, the brick and mortar all crafted over time.

Survivor has a passive quality to it for me. Surviving just happens. A person walks away from a catastrophic event – a plane crash, a bombing, whatever – and everyone else has perished. Why me? What does this mean that I survived and the others didn’t? The inevitable questions. An aftershock occurs then as two thoughts collide. Both thoughts balance on a razor thin seesaw – our survival doesn’t mean anything, and our survival means everything. One possible outcome happened, and anything except that outcome might also have happened. Limit and limitlessness echo the first catastrophe, the first overturning. So, try as we might, the unvarnished truth gains no purchase in our minds. So, we create a story. We make it mean something.

“Survivor” then is too gratuitous a word for a day like today. Too much in the realm of the gods, where the Fates continue on with their mindless spinning and cutting. Even the very roots of this word speak to its passivity. It comes from supervivere, and it means “to outlive”.

And I suspect that not all endurers are survivors. Many endurers endured for as long as they could, even as long as they lived. Maybe they endured, maybe they built their endurance day after day until that moment when the Fates capriciously stopped spinning and cut the thread that tethered them to this world. And that may well be why it is an irrefutable assertion by every veteran I have ever encountered that the very best of them did not survive their ordeal, that the very best of them were either laid to rest there in the ground that they sanctified, or they were carried home to sanctify another place. Even thye endured.

Perhaps that is what I admire most about Dad and Steve. Each in their own ways have endured, and continue to endure. And here the roots of this word, endure, serve as valuable informants – indurare is Vulgar Latin meaning “to harden”.

Perhaps now the next time I see a homeless veteran with his telling tattoos and equally telling gaze, I will see an endurer. Perhaps now I can let go of some judgments, and when I encounter anyone, I will see an endurer.

The truth of it is that I do not know what a veteran looks like. Is it that man in his late fifties pushing his shopping cart toward the freeway overpass? Is it the nurse in the ER who looks more than tired, who looks weary? Or is it the old man alone in the wheelchair who has but one leg, and whose crisp white shirt is now a size too big? And a veteran may well be the man in his thirties driving a massive SUV with those ribbony "Support Our Troops" magnets on the back - still armored, still vigilant. Maybe these are veterans all. They have long since abandoned their uniforms, yet they may not have left their units.

All we can know with any certainty is that they are endurers. We can know that they have been hardened, and perhaps even tempered, by the hammer and anvil moments that have crafted so much of their lives.

All I can know is that these veterans are an inspiration to me. They are a reminder that building endurance is also one way to make meaning of our suffering.