I now write, speak and dedicate all of my personal and professional resources to aiding in an answer to why our children are dying at the rate of every 40 seconds around the world. I am a United States Army Veteran, who has never been in combat. Yet, 22 of my brothers and sisters in arms die each day from the rigors of PTSD, Depression and Traumatic Brain-Stem Injury related mental health issues.
I am not a writer. I throw commas at a sentence like I am playing darts. My son placed a punctuation mark on my life that set a standard for my writing, so I want to learn. I am just a guy who figuratively climbed into the grave with my kid two years ago. When he died two years prior to that I figuratively stepped over his dead body, as I had literally stepped over bodies before. Two years ago I finally succumbed to my final and most deadly father, Shame.
I listened to them, they called like you said. I was quiet and they shared their pain. Even the ones that didn’t lose a child, I listened to them to. I tell people now that my brand is grief, that my niche is suicide and my name is parent. I got that right, didn’t I? It’s not about me, it’s about something bigger than me, isn’t it?
My friend called me last night and I won’t use his name but he is the reason I am writing this today because I want the world to understand something. He wept, literally like a child sobbing and I felt such sorrow for him. He was crying “Bobby, I had no idea, what did they do to you”?
People often ask me, “How do you do it”? My answer is simply that “I can’t, not alone”. Now, believe me I honestly gave it my best effort and I was a good soldier. That is something my grandfather, and our family in general because that was how it was in the 1960s, used to say to me when I was a little boy. Being a good soldier was important.
