When those who cared are gone ... what then?

Jim Goldsworthy, Columnist

On a shelf beside my easy chair sits what may be the last picture ever taken of my father, at a Keyser High School class reunion to which he was invited.

In a room filled with people who love him, he is sitting by himself, and he looks old, tired and a bit sad and lonely.

In some ways it is my favorite picture of him, because while I have many photos of the man who was my father, I have few of the man who was my best friend.

A couple of my buddies have noticed that I’ve not been my usual self lately, and I told them I’ve just been trying to shake a cold.

I wish it was that simple. In large part, it’s because of what some of my other friends are going through, and there is little I can do about it for reasons that are both personal and professional. The older I get, the more it seems that the pain experienced by those I care about is harder to deal with than my own.

I recently wrote a straight news story about some veterans — mostly Vietnam War-era — who met in hopes of finding a way to reverse the Veterans Administration’s decision to end their counseling relationship with the Re-Entry clinic of Cumberland. The VA will now require them to be counseled at one of its facilities.

The story was not going to just go away, and after talking with both myself and my editors, I decided someone else should cover it. They had asked if I wanted to continue with it and agreed with the reasons for my decision, adding that it didn’t surprise them.

Some of my friends have asked me about this, and I told them that when I am a columnist, I can be as opinionated as I wish, but when I am a reporter I am just that — an impartial observer. At least that’s the way it’s supposed to be, but too often is not, these days.

For anyone who regularly reads my columns or hears one of the speeches I make now and then, the thought would reasonably be, “I know how he feels about veterans. How can he write an unbiased story, when he has to give the VA’s side, too?”

In addition to my friends who go to Re-Entry, I have another friend who works there, so I have an idea of how complicated this matter really is. After a 20-minute conversation, I told my friend I didn’t believe I’d ever said, “I don’t understand,” or “That makes no sense,” so often in such a short time. She said most of it made no sense to her, either.

Then I asked her this: If she had a son or daughter who came to Re-Entry for counseling, would she handle it herself? She said, “No,” then told me she understood why I had to let somebody else carry on with the story.

Re-Entry is a private company that has a contract with the VA to counsel veterans who have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, a torment no one can understand unless he or someone he loves suffers from it. It doesn’t go away, and all you can do is learn how to live with it.

Abe Goldsworthy, my uncle the World War II Army medic, surely had PTSD. I saw what it did to him and the rest of our family, and for a long time, I came close to actually hating him for it. It was only later in his life that I began to appreciate the nature of the demons that still hounded him because of what happened to him decades before.

But come to live with it, he did, and I grew to love him virtually as much as I did my dad. Toward the end of his life, Abe asked to be accorded military honors at his funeral — something his son and daughter and I would not have believed, once upon a time.

Without realizing it, I probably had something to do with that change.

One night, I thanked him for what he’d done, and then he began to talk to me about it. Each time we met after that, he told me a little more, and each time, it seemed to be a little easier for him. He generally waited until we were alone, and his son Craig has told me he could tell there was a bond between his father and me that even he could not share.

Some of my friends have gone to Re-Entry for many years. They’ve told me stories about their war experiences that most non-veterans would find hard to believe. Sometimes, they tell me what it means just to be able to talk to someone ... not necessarily someone who understands — because no one can truly understand another person’s version of hell — but someone who knows how important it is to say, “I’m here, I care, and I’m listening.”

Now, these same men are losing someone who has done that for them on a regular basis for a long, long time. They’re going to have to break in a stranger, one who knows nothing about them and may not be available in the middle of the night or at other times when help is most needed. I can’t imagine how difficult this is going to be for them.

I once loved to go hunting, but my hunting buddies grew old and stopped going into the woods, and I haven’t gone again for more than 25 years. I’ve been shot at twice, by people who weren’t supposed to be on our land, and don’t know what it would take for me to adopt a new set of hunting buddies I’d have to trust with my life.

My father, who was my best friend, was the man I talked to when I was happy, sad, troubled or angry. Even if he didn’t always understand, he was always there, he always cared, and he always listened. He knew how important it was for me to talk about whatever was eating at me, and he knew what to say in response ... or when to say nothing at all.

Dad’s been gone for six years this month, and I no longer have him to talk to. I didn’t realize just how closed the door to my heart has become until the other night when I called his last surviving cousin, who lives in Ohio.

Peaches and I hadn’t talked for a while, and we reminisced a bit about our family. I was telling her about my dad’s last days, and my mother’s, when suddenly, without any idea it was going to happen, I began sobbing uncontrollably into the telephone.

After it finally went away, I told her, “I’m sorry. I haven’t done that for years.”

“That’s OK, honey,” she said. “You needed that. I’m glad I could help you let it come out.”

This is the part where I usually come up with a dynamite ending, one that ties all the loose ends together, hits you squarely in the gut and says, “That’s how it is. That’s all you need to know, and nothing else needs to be said.”

But I don’t have one. I know only that people I care about are in pain for reasons I don’t understand, and I’m unable to do anything about it. Some of these men are close enough to me that we call each other “brother.”

They are in pain only because they once stood watch over the rest of us while we were living our own comfortable lives and probably not thinking much about them, except in the worst possible terms, because we hated the war in which they were involved — a war they were blamed for losing, but which really was lost by the politicians after they came home.

They gave up their health, their sanity and, you might as well say, their lives to keep America safe and free for another generation.

Dear God, don’t they deserve better?