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"My name is Lara. I'm 29 years old, and I'm a survivor."
She took a deep breath and looked around at the men and women around her, taking strength from the compassion on their faces.
"This is my tenth meeting, and I'd like to read something that I prepared.
When I think of Aiden, I think of my childhood. Our mothers were sisters, and we grew up in the same town until I was twelve. Then we moved away, and his parents died. He moved in with our grandparents, then into the marines. My mother had a falling out with her parents and we stopped spending holidays together. I went to college, moved on with my life, didn't really give him much thought. I mean, I missed him. But out of sight, out of mind, right?
The next time I thought about him, really thought about him, his CO was sitting in my living room telling me that Aiden was MIA. Hell, I hadn't even known he was deployed. I knew that we'd been sending more troops into the middle east, but I'd never really thought that would effect me. Last I'd heard he was being stationed to Colorado. Next thing I know he's gone.
Two years later I got a call. They'd found him, he was coming home. I didn't recognize the man who showed up on my doorstep a week later. He was fine at first; he was quiet and polite and apologetic for taking up my spare bedroom. It took a week before I even sorted out why he was out of the service; he'd been medically discharged because of some kind of drug he'd been exposed to in the field. He wouldn't say anything else, and I didn't want to push. Looking back, I should have pushed harder.
A few weeks after he moved in he started looking for work; he ended up landing a job as a mechanic. Two months later he was looking again, said the air was bad in the garage. Three more jobs came and went in the next month and a half. He started having nightmares, bad ones. I'd find him in the living room in the middle of the night watching infomercials, old movies - I think he went through my entire DVD collection in the first two weeks he was with me. We talked about trying a sleeping pill, just to break the cycle, but he wouldn't touch them. Wouldn't take aspirin. He was obsessive about it; I'd find him cleaning out my medicine cabinet at two in the morning, muttering about those damn pills. If I tried to stop him he'd break things and shout at me about how nobody should ever depend on chemicals.
I tried to get him to go in for counseling, talked to the people at the VA about his options. Everyone said he just needed a little time, he'd be fine.
He wasn't fine.
He stopped going out. He stopped even pretending to look for a job, said people stared at the patch over his left eye. I suggested that he talk to someone about a prosthetic, they make them well enough that a lot of times you can't even tell the difference. He'd start shouting about how it wasn't just his eye that was the problem, but he wouldn't show me. He never took that patch off, not even when he slept. By that point he was sleeping less, and when he did it was painful to watch.
He started talking in his sleep. I think I learned more from his nightmares than I ever did from him. He'd talk in code names - "Wraith" "Atlantis" "Jumper". I asked him what they meant, but he just shut down. Said it didn't matter anymore, he could never go back. I know he saw people die. I know he saw horrible things that I can't begin to understand.
But after six months, I'd had enough. I loved my cousin, the boy I remembered running through sprinklers with in the middle of summer. I tried to love the man he'd become, but I couldn't put my life on hold for him forever. I couldn't date. I couldn't have friends over. I was having problems at work because he'd call in the middle of the day confused about when and where he was, talking about dead people. I'd done my homework, I was pretty sure he had PTSD. The marine corps could damn well fix what it was that they broke in my little cousin. I took him in for screening at the VA, and they sent him home with a prescription for a sedative. Said he just needed more time to get used to things again, that he was disturbed for reasons unrelated to his military service. They said that he hadn't seen combat in six years, he'd been stationed to US bases - Colorado and Antarctica. They told me he'd get better, just to give him a little while longer.
I was concerned, but I was also hopeful. I mean, the psychiatrists at the VA see reactions to combat all the time, they must have known what they were talking about, right? Two days later, I left for work after a fight about the prescription. I wanted him to try it, see if it would help. I told him he needed to try what the doctors said, or he could find somewhere else to live. He was terrified of taking any medications, but I thought he'd calm down once he'd started getting treatment. I thought if he would just listen, things would get better. Well, for once he listened to me.
When I got home that afternoon, I found him on the living room floor. The prescription bottle was empty. He was pronounced dead at 5:45 two days before his twenty-eighth birthday. There was no note, no explanation. He'd been mad when I left, but no more so than any other fight we'd had."
She took a shaky breath, closing her eyes and seeing his face again. When she spoke again, her voice was quieter. "My family hasn't spoken to me since it happened, not even at the funeral. The marine corps won't tell me what happened to him. I'm moving on, but it's hard. I thought that I would feel relieved, you know? But I don't, I just feel hollow."
She opened her eyes and straightened to face the group, absently brushing away the tears on her cheeks. "My name is Lara Kendall, and my cousin Aiden commited suicide eleven months ago today."
~ Finis ~
Author's Note: Conservative estimates place the number of Vietnam Veterans who have died by their own hand to be equivalent to the number of men killed in action during that conflict. The US government has repeatedly refused to gather statistical data on post-war suicide rates, so no official number is available. That suicide is the silent killer in the military and veteran populations is fact, and the numbers (especially among veterans) are staggering. For more information, I recommend the book Flashback: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Suicide, and the Lessons of War by Penny Coleman.
The official S.O.S. is a strictly online organization, but for the purposes of this fic I inferred that the name is given to local suicide support groups.