Dear Mom

Good evening,

I went to the beach today. I drove my blacked out sports car down 41, weaving through tourists with my favorite music playing. I walked barefoot on the sand, down to my spot next to the breakers, and I sat. I saw a plane overhead that wasn't commercial traffic, it was clearly a 135 in MacDill's pattern. "Watching one of our own, tearing up the pattern over Tampa Bay, Florida, as I watch from the sand. Nothing gets better," I thought.

I had visualized this moment for four weeks, I even wrote about it: "the end". I slept through many cold nights and endured plenty worse with the thought that on February 1st, 2019, I would be on a beach watching my friends fly above me. It's a beautiful feeling, one that I'd hoped would cling to me as I endured my time in Washington.

But for an entire month, that feeling was robbed of me. The feeling of "the end" has no shortcuts. The psychologists told us, "when you're in pain and misery, just visualize that beach, or that ski slope, or that spouse you cling to, the mind will allow you to escape." I found that to be a lie. When I was going into shock from the ice water, I had not a single neuron left in my brain to think about Karen, the beach, or warmth. Thought's very rapidly turn to survival. What is it? What can I do right now, to get me out of this fucking coffin, and eventually home. That's what the brain resorts to: the ultimate end. Survival, so you can enjoy everything you love, in health, one day in the future.

Dad told me about your situation. The bleakness of potentially doing chemo again covers us all in the family, running a marathon and being told to run another. I'll tell you what dad told me after being tortured: I don't and can't understand what it feels like, the emotions, despair, anger, the questions. But I get it. I get emotions. I get despair. I get anger. I have questions that are never answered. There are a lot of things that we can't control, can't know. God does, but we aren't God. We are simply here at the poker table of life, with the cards we've been dealt.

Another thing the psychologists told us, which was not a lie, that I really latched onto, is that, and I can't emphasize this enough, "IT. WILL. END." The thing I figured out early on, perhaps the biggest secret in tough military training, is that that ending is by your own accord. That is the one piece of control you get in life. At SERE we had a safeword. "Flight Surgeon." If I ever said that word, at any point in training, everything would have stopped and a SERE psychologists would've snowmobiled into my location, and at that point, I could've S.I.E'd, self induced elimination. The military acronym for quit. I could've just quit, and it all would've been over. But had I done it, that day would've been the last day I wore my wings, a fate to me worse than death.

When I was in a coffin being showered with ice water, I knew I could force myself to stop shivering, and let my body go unconscious. I knew the Air Force regulations, once I conk out training is done, I get rushed to the hospital. I could end it, rather quickly. But had I done that, I will have lost consciousness without a blow to the head, which is a precursor to epilepsy, migraines, all sorts of potential complications. My medical clearance would've been in jeopardy. It may have been the last day I wore my wings. So I stayed awake, and endured.

I knew I had just a hair of control over my situation. I could quit, and be done with my career and life, or I could take one more miserable step. This conversation in my head was a broken record for eight days. But the only logical, emotional, rational choice, is to take another step - one step closer to the end. That is the only option. Yes, you have a choice, but only one makes sense. You can't quit on yourself, on your family, on your God, you take one more miserable step towards the end. And as long as that step is on course, the end will come.

Mom, you obviously don't have incredibly intense military training ahead of you where they bend your emotions to a breaking point. You're in a very different boat altogether. But the psychological tensions are the same. "I have a lot of shit ahead of me, and I don't even know how much. I don't know if I can handle it." It's a position of despair and fear. But you have an advantage, you know how this works. You know how kidney stints work (if it comes to it), you know when to eat the brownie and when it's futile. Just like I'm trained to make a real world experience as a POW more comfortable, you have the experience, which always trumps training, to make chemo livable, survivable, enough to get through this.

I remember how awful it was seeing you in chemo. And after watching 15 adults cry over me being iced, when I turned out fine emotionally (relatively), I'm convinced that not only is the dread worse than the deed, but going through it is not the hard part. Having your loved ones look over you is the hard part. And your husband and I are mentally and emotionally the strongest people you know, believe me. We've seen some shit. We will be by your side, unwavering like the American Flag through the snowfall. We will be fine. We just want you to be fine.


And considering the circumstances; considering you left your home in Utah because you wanted a better life which lead to us, considering the strength and bond of our family that will never leave you, considering you raised me to be a superhuman, getting through engineering, pilot training, SERE, and considering that you are the toughest of all of us because, shit, you've done this before; you will be fine. You will get to the sacred "end".

There is nothing worse than having your health or freedom taken from you. You and I have experienced both. It sucks. It really fucking sucks. But until you forget that God has planned an ending to this chapter, where Karen and I visit for Christmas and drink bourbon around the fire because we're freezing; until you forget that your husband is by you thick and thin with great health insurance, desperate to go to fucking North Dakota for some reason, and until you forget that the son you raised will continue to succeed in everything he loves and wanted in life and calls you each weekend...

You will reach the end.


And then you will be forced to go to North Dakota. And I can't help you there.