Gratitude 62

I am grateful for my recovery from trauma.  In the meantime, please click on this song by the Strumbella's for a soundtrack while reading this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9kXstb9FF4

It is basically a song about living with PTSD, and even though my own trauma issues weren't related to combat, war or guns or the military, it all still relates.  I only just heard the song this afternoon while relaxing with the weekend Globe and Mail and listening to a literature program on CBC Radio One.  They played this song.  And it resonates so strongly with my experience for around three years before I really moved into recovery in 2002.

Then, in the newspaper, I noticed a troubling photo.  In Venezuela an elderly man in a demonstration against the Maduro government kicking at the plastic shield of a young riot cop.  All those riot police armed to the nines against protesting grandmas and grandpas who only want a better life, a better country and a better government.  I was reminded of my first visit to Mexico City in 2009.  I was taking a long walk through the principal park and green space, Chapultepec Park, where the president of Mexico, then Felipe Calderon, has his official residence, a mansion sequestered on top of a very well-secured hill.

As I walked through that area I came across a huge phalanx of riot police, shields, weapons, everything and they were blocking the road.  I politely asked one of them in Spanish, a young woman, if I could pass through.  She smiled and said yes.  Then I saw something that really surprised me.  There was a large crowd of people, senior citizens and young mothers with infants and small children, marching in a demonstration against a new and costly energy policy in their town that they could not afford.  There were maybe two hundred of them.  I have never seen a demonstration of such vulnerable looking individuals, and greeted by riot police ready to inflict serious harm?  This is an image that will never leave me.  I walked with them for a while, chatted with some of them.  They seemed to really appreciate the support from this visiting Canadian.  It fortunately did not come to violence.  But what an image!

Then I suddenly found myself thinking of one of many rather horrible things that happened to me while I was still just recovering from trauma.  There was an individual, his name was Jeff, who was stalking and hounding me with a personal vendetta.  He had exaggerated a series of minor offences (I had not been sufficiently friendly to him and I was unkind to his girlfriend with whom I once lived in community)  He would trail and follow me on foot, on his bicycle, in a car, threatening me with violence.  This, while I was already traumatized and all he could do was add to my trauma. 

Jeff was brutally murdered one night thirteen years ago, almost to the week.  I had nothing to do with it.  A mutual friend ended our friendship when I refused to attend his funeral.  On the advice of my then psychotherapist, my presence there would have been highly inappropriate.  I was then participating in a support group for male survivors of childhood sexual abuse.  I did not like this group very much, finding people there to be particularly harsh and aggressive.  When I told them during my debriefing about Jeff's murder and how he had been hounding and frightening me they were unanimous that I ought to be dancing on his grave.  I couldn't believe what I was hearing.

Regardless of how repugnant his behaviour was towards me he was still a human being and no one, but no one deserves to die the way he did.  I soon left this group.  I still remember Jeff, perhaps not fondly, but, yes, with compassion, despite my anger at him.  Jeff Hendry, may you finally rest in peace.  And may the bastard who so wrongly and cruelly took your life be finally found and brought to justice.