Unwashed Pyjamas in a Ziplock Bag | Remebrance Reflections

As Remembrance approaches, we often think about those who served, those who died, and the families who continue to live with their loss. But for some families, this time of year brings a quieter kind of grief, as memories return and the person they love seems a little further away. In this deeply personal reflection, one TRP Member shares what it can be like to stand alongside a veteran carrying the memories of friends and colleagues lost in service, and the small, everyday things that can help them feel safe and connected. Thank you so much to Sam for sharing her words.

This article touches on bereavement, military loss and PTSD.

Sam, a Member of The Ripple Pond shares her words reflecting on Remembrance

I appreciate it’s an odd title for a delicate subject and it actually holds none of the comedic value you would be forgiven for imagining it does, but we are coming up to ‘that time of year’ that is dreaded by so many of us, it may even be the reason you found your way here to TRP. Let me explain the relevance of the message contained within the rather quirky title, but to do so, I must first take you back to 2004. 

In the last months of 2004, my husband was serving in Iraq; a soldier with The Black Watch Regiment. The significance of the trifecta November-2004-Black Watch Regiment will not be lost on anyone who served or whose loved ones served during the Op Telic years. In October and November 2004, The Black Watch sustained several losses, and my husband took each of those losses personally. What I can say with cast iron certainty is that he still does, because he felt that the care and physical and emotional safety of his friends and colleagues and their loved ones back home was his responsibility. I have yet to speak to a survivor of an event that has taken the life of their loved one who does not feel this way if I am honest, and there has sadly been too many to count.

Each year, therefore, as we reach the last days of October; as the daylight dwindles, mornings become chilly and the going down of the sun arrives earlier each day, the memories of those young men and their families become his constant companion. During those autumn weeks social media posts remembering those who died appear to arrive earlier each year, catching him seemingly unawares and flooding his mind with the memories he had put to bed over the preceding months.

The loved ones of the fallen are left battling their own grief; their greatest fear forgetting the smiling face of their son or husband.

They wish desperately to remember the young man who never came home, and they swing heartbreakingly between imagining the life they would have led and not to dwelling on the potential that was lost. On occasion these bereft relatives reach out to the kind and gentle Scotsman who made their unbearable loss almost tolerable, as if by connecting with the person who was with them in their last moments in this life will bring them closer to the man they lost. From what I have seen, however, the memorials, the love and the gratitude of those families is of little comfort to the man who was near them, with them, talked to them or held them as they died.

At this time of year the Jock humour stops. I go through the motions at work glancing at my phone, desperate to see a profanity laden message about something the children have done or yearning to hear an inappropriate joke at my expense tear through the quiet of our home followed by guffaws of laughter at his own hilarity and my faux irritation. I want him to tell me that I'm an admin Claymore with an enormous bottom because that would mean that he is my lovely, kind, funny, caring, filterless Mad Jock once more; but at this time of year all I hear is silence. I used to assume that he disappeared into himself and his memories, but I have realised that the reality is much simpler; he returns. He returns to a time and place where I have never been and that they still inhabit, where they still live carefree with hopes, dreams and plans for the future. He returns to a time before October 2004, to a place where he is known and understood and where his presence, mood, words, actions, or the way he sees the world demand no explanation. It is a place where he can still hear their voices and talk to them in the language shared only by those who have ventured together where angels fear to tread. He has and does experience PTSD and there are many nights I stroke his hair or hold him whilst his mind replays horrors I cannot imagine, but mercifully he seldom remembers those night terrors beyond the lingering feeling of tiredness that tells him he 'had a bad night'. His annual return to that world is not, however, a tangible expression of the psychological scars of war, it is an expression of grief and remembrance in a place that he must visit alone.

I am sure the title of this must seem all the more obscure now, after all, how can unwashed pyjamas be of any relevance to an act of remembrance? It is because we, the wives, girlfriends, partners, husbands, boyfriends of veterans who lost friends and colleagues in conflict and who are growing older without the best friend they imagined they would walk through life with; we are deeply anchored in their present. We are the person who has often taken the place of the loyal friend who Kipling called The Thousandth Man.

We are the light in the window when they must find their way home in the dark and we are the warm embrace when they come in from the cold. They trust us in their most vulnerable moments to keep them safe with the door open and the fire lit so that when they make their annual solo journey to that place of love and grief they do it with the assurance that they will find their way home to the safety of your warmth and the familiar comfort of your touch.

The hardest thing for many of our veterans, however, is that life moves on and, at this time of year, it is the ordinariness of the life that continues around them after they have seen that first poppy of the year that becomes so hard to bear. To most, especially those who have not served or have no connection to the armed forces community, Remembrance Day is an ordinary day with deadlines to meet, reports to file, classes to be taught and children to be cared for. For our veterans this time of year often makes them feel incredibly conspicuous, as though their grief and vulnerability is visible. They feel they will be judged for their inability to engage with the civilian world around them that they must remain a part of. You, their anchor, must also go about daily life in the same way, and that is where that ziplock bag holding your unlaundered pyjamas comes in. Smell is the most evocative of the human senses and something that smells of you that can be wrapped around a pillow, worn by them or draped over them while they sleep can elicit the same sense of safety that they feel when you are in the room next to them. Grief is not linear you see and it never goes away. Grief ambushes you years later when you least expect it, when a baby is born, when an old wound makes its presence felt, when you are asked a question about your life and in October when the first poppies of remembrance appear. It was Jamie Anderson who said that grief is simply love with nowhere to go, proof of an enduring bond that cannot be severed by death. The words Lest We Forget are heard often at this time of year, but for those who served those words are of little meaning because they will never forget and neither do they want to. Your being there as their constant, anchoring them to their safe place is what they need, and when you cannot physically be present there is always your unwashed pyjamas in a ziplock bag.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning.

We will remember them.