It’s Memorial day today, the day to remember and honor troops who laid down their lives in the call of duty. When I moved to the United States such occasions felt a bit distant. The last big war already had a generation of distance to it . American wars were what you read about in a Tim O’Brien novel, or saw in a Kubrick movie. But this intellectualization of war ended in 2001 and since then we’ve lived through the long wars in what the Bush neocons called “the Greater Middle-east”. About 7000 soldiers died in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But these official Pentagon numbers do not include the troops who return home and kill themselves as a result of psychological wounds such as PTSD. Over 30,000 service members and veterans of the post-9/11 wars have committed suicide -- over four times as many as have died in combat. We certainly need to do a lot more for those who we send to war and those who live to see its horrors. We may oppose the war, but we must respect the warrior. Because the warrior often is the Karna who went into the battlefield full of moral doubts but who’s dharma was steadied by his Krisna.
May 30th is also the day we lost our mother a year ago to a different kind of war. A war that was at once within and without. A personal loss like that is often transformative, and after a year of befuddled filial grief, as I sat in her empty room a few weeks ago, I dreaded presence. Presence of memories and of loss. What I experienced instead was stillness. A sensory experience that I can at best describe as a quietude of white fluffy clouds. Palpable, yet ephemeral. Empty, yet with a waft of what Nietzsche called eternal recurrence.
“The wise grieve neither for the living nor for the dead. There was never a time when you and I and all the kings gathered here have not existed and nor will there be a time when we will cease to exist.” - The Bhagavad Gita
Is it even spring;
till you see
the season’s butterfly
flutter its wing.
till the nectar
of the last flower
is magically
stolen by the bee.
So that life
can sprout,
and the circle with no end
can go on.
Well conceived and emotional too.