Our Actions Have Consequences

I’m still reeling from hearing about a high school friend’s death on Friday. My first feeling was one of emptiness, and I had no words to explain how I felt. Our class has lost so many classmates during the last few years, and her recent death had me second-guessing my life choices. I knew that she had been having medical problems, but 39 seemed too early to die from natural causes. She had celebrated her birthday the day before. I saw all the posts on Facebook, how grateful she was to friends and family for remembering her birth, and the outpouring of love touched me. Her age at death caused me great concern because I’ll be 39 in a week.

            Her death, so close to her birthday, triggered another memory for me that made this event much more depressing. I was deployed in 2001, and, when I got to work, I was going to call my friend Chris to wish her happy birthday. We had a meeting, and we were instructed not to make any phone calls until the meeting was over. We were waiting on a supervisor so that the meeting could start, so I jumped on the computer to check my e-mail. I was not prepared for the news that waited on the other end. A friend had sent me an e-mail to let me know that Chris had succumbed to cancer the night before. I was lost. I was thousands of miles away, and I felt helpless. I knew she had been fighting cancer, knew she had been in remission, but she never told me in any of the conversations we had that the cancer was back. She never wanted me to worry about her, especially when I was deployed. She felt I needed to focus on the mission at hand, and she’d wait until I returned from deployment to tell me the cancer was back. I understood why she kept me in the dark, but I still hated that she did so.

            Sometimes I wonder if she was the lucky one. She never had to see what happened on 9/11 because she died a month before. She never had to see what this world has come to. How depravity has consumed our nation and world worse than it ever has before. Even working in the medical field and seeing how brutal human nature could be, there was always a beautiful light within her. It was as if she would not allow the world to destroy her. I don’t know how she would have handled 9/11, if she could have handled it if faced with the worst kind of evil.

            I remember getting the news that day of her passing and shutting down. I zoned through the whole meeting we had. Afterwards, I pulled my superintendent to the side and told him what had happened. He took me to an area where no one would hear us and let me cry, talk, and laugh. I told him stories about her that brought back wonderful feelings. At the same time, I knew that I could never make any new feelings or memories with her. We bonded over that. He shared with me the death of his brother a month before. Up until then, he hadn’t talked to anyone about it.

            Later that day when the plane came down, we had multiple problems with the engine. We had to access both sides of the engine, and, because the knots were so high, we had to remove both cowlings (the outer frame/shell that protects the engine) from the engine. We put the cowlings on a trailer and cinched them down so that the wind would not blow them off the trailer. When I was cinching one cowling down, I realized that the strap was broken, and that someone had tied the strap around the pole in order to keep it tight. So I did the same. I pulled tight on the strap. As I was pulling, the strap snapped in half because it was dry rotted. Normally, that might not have been a problem, but I was standing on top of the trailer. When the strap broke, I stumbled backwards and hit a rail that was calf high. The speed at which I was traveling, coupled with hitting the rail, caused me to back flip in the air, and I landed on my neck on the tongue of the trailer. My arm was pinned underneath me, and blood oozed from the abrasions on my arm.

            I felt like an idiot. I should have went to the hospital, should have gotten my neck and leg checked out, but I refused to go. You see, there is this mentality when a person is deployed that the mission comes first. We never consider the pain we are in because we have a job to do. Not only that, lying in a hospital bed would only make me think about Chris, and I didn’t want to think about her. I didn’t want to think about the fact that I’d never see her again, never have her pick on me again, never hear her wisdom again, never cry on her shoulder again, and never be able to pay my respects. So I worked. Thirteen years later, and I’m still dealing with the side effects to that accident. Maybe if I had gone to the hospital, the outcome would have been different. I could hardly walk for a month. Knots kept forming in my leg, and I was concerned about blood clots, but I kept working. I couldn’t eat anything without becoming nauseous except for frozen yogurt. So for a month, that’s all I ate. The smell of food alone made me sick. I was finally able to eat a month later, and then life as I knew it changed.

            There was no more time to think about Chris, what I could or couldn’t do. There was only the fact that our nation had been attacked and what do we do now? Outside of letting my family know that I was safe and that simultaneous attacks did not occur in deployed sites, contact with my family and friends was nil. We had a mission to do, and news from the outside was a distraction, the same thing Chris always tried to shield me from.

            I found out today that the death of my recent friend might have been due to suicide. I was dumbfounded. I was still in contact with her, even though I hadn’t seen her in several years. The last time I saw her was when I ran into her at a store in our hometown a few years ago. She was always so uplifting in her posts, always reaching out to those in need, always seemingly happy even in the midst of her medical problems. So I’m lost as to how we all missed how depressed she was, so depressed that she felt she couldn’t live on this earth any longer.

            I blame technology for us missing the signs. We believe because we send text messages, send Facebook messages, or see our friends’ Facebook or Instagram posts that we are somehow connected. Yes, these technological advances have helped us keep up with people all over the world, but we have become so dependent on technology that we have lost the human component. I remember when I was younger and I would call home to talk with my mom. We’d be carrying on a conversation, and about five minutes into the conversation, I’d ask her what was wrong. “Nothing,” she’d say. “Everything is fine.” “No it’s not,” I’d say. “I can hear it in your voice.” You see, I could tell by the inflection in her voice that she was troubled. I can’t tell that in a text message. I can’t see happy posts from people and still pick up the underlying tremor in their voice.

            We’ve become so wrapped up in our own little worlds that the only thing we have time for is a quick message. We don’t have time to sit down at the coffee shop and enjoy a good conversation. We don’t have time to pick up the phone because we only have a few minutes to talk. We don’t have time to visit people because we are too busy working to provide food for our families and a roof over our heads. We get so busy that we miss things. We even miss things in our own families, even when we live next door. We get so “busy” in our lives that we can’t even walk across the yard to check on an ailing parent because we don’t even know how to have true human interaction anymore.

            What I’ve thought about most in the last few days is that actions have consequences. The things we do to ourselves have the potential to hurt so many people. Our actions have become selfish. This situation also reminds me of the death of my father. He didn’t commit suicide per se, but his actions were no less relevant to his cause of death. His years of alcohol and drug abuse led to his heart attack. So yes, his actions had consequences. And his friends and family took the brunt of his actions.

            Our actions define us. Yes, we may get upset and say things to people in confidence because that is human nature. But when we let our actions affect others, there is a problem. We can’t continuously use and abuse family and friends and hope they will be there when life is too difficult. We can’t spout off profanities about family and friends in front of our children, expecting that we are not hurting those children. Because, if we really loved those children, they’d never know that mommy and daddy are fighting, or that mommy and daddy are having a conflict with someone the child loves dearly.

            We’ve become a nation of not only refusing to care about others the way we are supposed to, but also we have become so self-absorbed that we think that everyone should hate or dislike a person that we don’t think highly of. We never realize the damage we do. Sadly, many children grew up this way, and they blame their parents for how they turned out. They think that because their parents talked badly about people in front of them, then it is okay for them to do the same thing to their children, while at the same time refusing to remember how they felt when a family member or friend said something hurtful about another family member or friend. They refuse to see that they are continuing a cycle of abuse and neglect.

            People too often blame society or family for the way they turned out. But rarely do those people take responsibility for their own actions. Rarely do they look within themselves and decide that they will be different parents or people; different, better role models than the ones they had. Rarely do they look at life circumstances and ask themselves how they can be better individuals for themselves or others.

            I am a religious person, but it does not matter how much we believe in and love God if we refuse to share that love with others. By denying human contact with others, we are denying God himself because we are all made in His image. Sadly, I live in a house with two other people and we rarely talk. The only time we do is when they have been drinking or they want something. I walk around on eggshells not knowing what to say to them because there is so much distance between us because there is no respect for each other in the house. We don’t mutually respect that we all share a living space and that the living space should be cleaned up on a regular basis out of courtesy to one another. The fact that I bring this to their attention has caused a rift. Despite that I respect them as people but don’t respect their actions is of great concern to me. Again, their actions affect other people, yet they refuse to understand that fact. And that’s kind of my whole point.

            We, as a society, have lost the ability to talk to one another, to appreciate one another, to respect one another. We don’t share our demons with others because no one cares enough to ask. Even living in the same household with someone does not guarantee that someone will notice a person is depressed. I remember that after my father died, no one noticed my depression: not my family, not my church members, not my pastors. It was a professor who noticed, who cared enough to listen, who cared enough to convince me to go to counseling. I was in counseling for months before I even told my family. Why? Because I didn’t know how to talk to them about what was going on with me without them bringing in their own drama. That’s not what I needed. I needed someone to listen and guide me without a personal agenda.

            If we expect to live in harmony on this earth, if we expect others to be there when we fall, we have to be willing to give the same back. We have to quit being leaches who suck the lifeblood out of others and discard those people when we can no longer get anything from them. We have to love with our whole heart the good and bad parts of people. Because it is only by doing that that we will be able to help them emotionally through the rough times in life. It is only then that they will ask for help when they fall into a depression. Technology has been our undoing, but humanity is what will make our broken parts perfectly imperfect.