Women Veterans: A Year Can Change it All

I am on a road trip back home to where I spent most of my life. This trip back home was to drive my daughter back so that she can start a new job and her new life as an adult on her own. She is not alone and will be back with what is left of my family, which got me thinking about how much can change in a year.

Last year we were facing a Christmas no one wanted to celebrate. A year ago we put our almost 14 year old Golden down. He had been very ill. Our daughter was still in college and I had no plans to go back. Now she’s done, I’m back in and she moved back home while I have to fly from here tomorrow to go back to Florida. Again, I don’t feel much like celebrating. I know how much I will miss her.

This trip back home to my home town was harder for other reasons. My family members have all passed away. Coming here made me miss them more than I thought it would as memories rushed back. Times of Christimas when the whole family was together really hurt to remember. Other years while living in Florida, it didn’t seem as bad because I had a new life, had to make my own new traditions, different groups of friends to spend time with and it was easier. All these memories rush back and I am sad thinking about what I lost instead of how much I gained.

Our life can change so much in a year. Just getting from one month to another can bring death and birth, jobs and lost jobs, new love and old memories. For the men and women in the military, they face all we do but they also have to face being away when all of it is happening.

This one set of twelve months when their lives are in danger, they lose members of their units, fear they will lose more or not make it back themselves, weighs on them, changes them and makes it damn near impossible to have anything inside of them remain the same.

They get on a plane with one part of their lives behind them and them head back on another plane with one part of their lives taking control. All the memories are there, living where they happened. Just as this trip back home awakened thoughts and feelings I thought would not affect me as much, they end up being sent back into combat where all the bad things happened before.

When they leave home for a year they discover the person they were before is gone as well. Parents get older, kids grow up, friends move, a favorite restaurant closes and they want it all back to the way it was before they left. They want to just put on their favorite clothes but discover they no longer fit the same way. They want to have it all put back to the way it all was before and finding out that can’t happen is depressing.

Maybe it is harder for women in the military than males but it is hard on all of them. When you add in PTSD into the mix of the normal changes humans face in general, it makes all of it seem even more impossible to cope with. Maybe it is one more reason why the suicide rate in the military and in our veteran population is so high.

Higher Suicide Rate Among Female Vets
Friday December 3, 2010
Depression Blog
By Nancy Schimelpfening

According to a new report entitled “Self-Inflicted Deaths Among Women with U.S. Military Service: A Hidden Epidemic?,” the suicide rate for female veterans is nearly three times that for their civilian counterparts.

Bentson McFarland, MD, PhD, a professor of psychiatry at the Oregon Health & Science University School of Medicine and two colleagues from Portland State University examined data from 5,948 female suicides committed between the years 2004 and 2007. What they found was that between the ages of 18 to 34, there were 56 suicides among 418,132 female veterans (1 in 7,465) while there 1,461 suicides among the 33,257,362 non-veterans (1 in 22,763).

The rate was lower in the next oldest age group studied, ages 35 to 44, and was even lower in the 45 to 64 age group. However, despite the fact that the rates in these two groups were lower than that for younger veterans, these figures were still higher than the rates for the civilian women.

Higher Suicide Rate Among Female Vets

They can all try to pretend that they can just get over it but when they really look at how much it has changed them, they can make peace with it and be able to allow room for the next time changes come. When it is PTSD, they can face it, heal it if not cure it, and most are able to come out on the other side better. They can discover love means more than it did before because they know what loss means more.

They can change their minds about what is important and not make small things matter as much. They can value spending time with the people they love more than just filling their time up with things that really don’t matter because they spent so much time in pain and missing living.

They changed in the year they were away but they can change for the better just as fast depending on what they do, how they look at life and what help them have to “move” onto a new life. We all “move” onto another part of our lives with hopes, dreams and pain along with loss but they have to do it at a higher level. They can if they have help to do it just as we all need help as humans. It does not have to hurt so bad they don’t want to try anymore. They just need help to find their way back home as close to “normal” as possible.