Telling: It like it is

"Show me a hero, and I'll write you a tragedy." ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

I heard this quotation off-hand on a t.v. show, and it brought Max to my mind. Max is the writer we worked with on The Telling Project. Max writes heroes' stories. Max writes tragedies. Max takes our words - words we spill out with tears, words we choke out with anger, words we chortle out with joy or surprise - and he turns them into cohesive stories. Max makes me sound funny. I am funny, but I can't write funny and I'm confused about how Max makes it so that when I tell my story, I am funny. I'd like to take credit for delivery, but Max knew what was funny before I took the words back into my mouth.

I did take the words back into my mouth. They were all my words. I read them and I memorized them and sometimes I kept them. There were things I had said that I needed to keep - words I used to describe my love for my husband, too precious for public consumption - and there were other words that needed out - words I choked out during our first performance because I hadn't prepared them during rehearsals, describing the pain of thinking my husband might not come home from Iraq.

During our week of rehearsals, I heard one woman recite over and over that her wedding was in September 2007. On our last day of rehearsals, I asked her what her wedding date was. The day she married her husband, who died from wounds sustained in Iraq, was exactly six days after I married my husband, who lives with wounds sustained in Iraq. She and I both started using our full wedding dates in our monologues, because we felt the impact of that.

I felt the impact as my husband described several of the most horrible moments of his life, one after the other, just the way they played out. I sat on stage with him, so that if he forgot his words, because he has a brain injury or because they are terrifying, I could hand them back to him, one by one, until he could remember them. I sat on stage for Karl and waited for him to come back from Iraq, like I do every day.

In many ways, he will never come back.

In some ways, he comes back every day.

In some ways, he comes back, bit by bit, as he lets his stories out, as he tells people where he has been, what he has done, and who he is. Karl carries war with him and as he lets pieces of his war out, as other people carry small bits of it for him, his war becomes easier to carry.

I am not a veteran. I am a witness. As I share my stories, I make witnesses of everyone around me. I alone cannot carry Karl's war, but if I can share it, we can carry it together and that makes it easier for me to carry too. This is why I write and why I participated in The Telling Project, so that I do not have to be alone... because I couldn't do this alone.