Veteran's Day

We had the Veteran's Day service at church Sunday morning and it became very emotional for me.  During the part where the different divisions of the service were acknowledged by music and the division emblem, I began crying.  My father was an ex-marine and all I could do was weep as I thought of him.  I really miss him, just to talk with and ask him his opinions.  That will never happen again and it's very difficult to reconcile myself to this reality.  It seems so surrealistic, and yet it is as realistic as life gets.

Grief is an overwhelming emotion and can come at the oddest moments.  It comes before I fall asleep at night and I see my dad struggling to breathe when he was at hospice.  It came Sunday morning as a surprise because I wasn't thinking of him at all until I remembered that he was also a veteran.  It came last week when I was struggling with which Medicare supplement to buy and I wished I could talk to him about it.  They say to grieve and then move on and I get that, I really do.  I feel a bit stuck, though, and I know time will help the grieving process to end.  I just need to give it more time.  A famous person said, "Grief is the price of love; you cry because you love." So very true...

I doubt that anyone ever thanked my dad for his service in the Marines.  At his funeral, we had a color guard and they presented my mom with a flag and played Taps.  I hadn't cried like that in a long, long time.  Jason has the flag and put it in a frame and I put a picture of my dad when he was a very young man, and some other items, in the frame.  I don't know what he's going to do with it now, but it's very nice - my dad would have liked it.  This is the picture I put in the frame, which would have been around the same time he was in the service:

Being patriotic is a relatively new concept for me.  Growing up in the 60's and 70's, I was not patriotic at all.  I hated war - I still do - and I never could understand why we would go into other countries to wipe out Communism or terrorists, like that was our responsibility and ours alone.  I hated the government and believe all politicians are liars, and still do.  I guess I was an anti-war, anti-government person who was never a part of any group, but just felt this way on my own.  I don't know how I came to be this way, but since getting older, this has changed.  I know now that each serviceperson is a hero and the government is a separate entity.  Although I'm not crazy about our government, I wouldn't want to live anywhere else.  Our freedom is not about our government - it is about men and women who fought for that freedom, with some giving their very lives as a result.  I understand this now and I am very grateful for those people who have and are still serving our country.