BOSTON -- Another day of trying to recover.
Once again, Carlos Arredondo, whose reaction to the death of his son became one of the iconic images of the Iraq war, is reading the last e-mail he received from him. "I'm in najaf," the e-mail from Marine Lance Cpl. Alexander Scott Arredondo begins, and those three words are enough to make a 44-year-old father once again feel as though he is on fire.
Every bit of Arredondo's skin is coated with antibiotic cream. His left palm has glass in it from when three Marines informed him that Alex was dead and he began smashing the windows of their van. His lower legs, which received the worst of the burns from when he splashed gasoline in the van and ignited it, are stained the color of cranberries. His hair, cut off in the hospital, is only now starting to grow back. His fingernails, ruined when he used his hands to claw holes in Alex's grave for flowers, are all gone.
The worst of Arredondo's injuries were on his legs, to which he applies antibiotic cream. Twenty-six percent of his body was burned.
(David Finkel -- The Washington Post)
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"do me a favor and check the news online. save pictures articles and videos if you can. i'll stay in contact until i move. let everyone know i love them," the e-mail from Alex goes on, and Arredondo continues to read it, oblivious to everything else, including his wife, Melida, who is in another room urgently typing a letter.
"Our family is in need," she writes on her computer.
"Medical costs are now over $50,000."
"We are inviting you to a very special" event, she continues, a fundraiser, and keeps writing until the phone rings and Arredondo comes in to see who's calling.
Maybe it's the psychologist. Maybe it's the grief counselor. Maybe it's the marriage counselor. Maybe it's his mother, who had a breakdown after pulling off his burning socks when he was on fire. Maybe it's Victoria, his first wife and Alex's mother, who called him a bastard when she heard what he had done. Maybe it's his son Brian, who is so confused by what Arredondo did that he has stopped all contact with his father.
"Hello," Melida says into the phone, and when Arredondo realizes it's not anyone he knows, he returns to a room where the walls are covered with photocopies of Alex's portrait, the windowsill is covered with the medications he needs to get through a day, and the bed is covered with copies of Alex's letters, including the first one he sent as he headed overseas.
"I am not afraid of dying," it says. "I am more afraid of what will happen to all the ones that I love if something happens to me."
"Oh, Alex. Oh, my goodness," Arredondo says as he picks that one up to read.
Defying Explanation
Even now, so many months later, no longer unconscious in a hospital burn unit, no longer restrained to his hospital bed as a precaution against suicide, no longer gasping as his skin is pulled off with tweezers, no longer encased in bandages, forgiven by the Marines, Arredondo says he does not know why he did what he did.
Was he trying to kill himself? Maybe, he says. Was he trying to bring attention to his son's death, the 968th of the war? Maybe it was that. Was it an act of protest against a war he doesn't like? Maybe. Was it out of anguish, or perhaps guilt, over being a less-than-perfect father? Maybe. Was it, as Melida says one afternoon when Arredondo has gone to Alex's grave, "poor impulse control"? Maybe it was that, too, he says when he returns, hands dirty, eyes shiny, retreating again to the room of portraits and e-mails.
He says he understands the meaning of grief now; less clear to him is the meaning of recovery.
"How am I going to feel better?" he says. "I have no idea."
It is a question not only for Arredondo, but for all of the survivors of the 1,300 U.S. troops killed so far in the Iraq war, the relatives who in those first moments scream and weep and slam the door and collapse. "The beginning of the war" is how Maj. Scott Mack, whose platoon members delivered the news to Arredondo, describes it.
And then come all the moments after, when "emotions become behaviors," says Tom Hannon, who counsels veterans and their families in Boston. The "profoundly depressed" mother of a Vietnam War veteran who has visited her son's grave every day for more than 30 years. The father of a Vietnam veteran who insisted that the name of his dead son never be mentioned again. "What's your responsibility?" Hannon says he asks parents. "Is it to flounder and fail, or is it conduct yourself in a way that honors your boy or girl? It's the difference between being a victim and a healthy survivor."
"Here are five criteria for recovery," says Robert Weiss, a senior fellow at the University of Massachusetts's Gerontology Institute in Boston and an expert on bereavement. "You regain internal comfort, which means you are not assailed by painful thoughts. Second, you regain the ability to experience gratification. Third, you have energy for daily life. Fourth, you find your social roles have meaning; you're not just going through the motions. And fifth, you can treat the future as if it has meaning. You can plan. You may even hope."
That's what recovery is, Weiss says, a person's return to his previous level of functioning, but reaching such a point takes "longer than anybody thinks" and only increases in difficulty when recovery is from the death of a child. "If you ask people who have had kids who died, they'll tell you that you don't get over it, you get used to it," he says. "There is a kind of persistent ache. There is a sense of having failed the kid somehow. There's just a complicated set of feelings of helplessness, self-blame and sometimes rage."
