On this Veteran’s Day, I watched ‘Saving Private Ryan’ in full for the first time. You asked me why I had not seen it all. The truth was, I couldn’t handle the cost of war.

I never could watch that movie while your Grandfather was alive. 50 years after the War, it was still too fresh for him; the wounds of battle were still too raw - and PTSD is an insidious Brutality. So when my Father passed from this world, free at last from the nightmares that haunted him until his dying day, that left your Grandmother and me...

We tried to watch, we really did, but your Grandmother’s tender heart could only take the first few frames. I myself couldn’t handle the first 10 minutes; I could only imagine my Father as a boy, in that hell of Carnage.

Later in the movie I peeked in and watched as much as I could tolerate. I saw the most important parts, like the end; but it was the Music that struck me most, an emotional portrait of the cost of war.

The year was was 2002 - that the year before you went to War.

There are things I still haven’t quite dealt with. I know it’s nothing compared to the hell of combat, but there is a different trauma that comes with watching your heart march away to war. Only music can convey that heartache...

that’s why the score for Saving Private Ryan has been on my playlist forever. Music was how I handled the potential weight of Grief; music helped me deal with the uncertainty of the war you and your friends were fighting. Many nights I spent face down in the floor, praying for you as the music played for on.

Because of those nights, Hymn to the Fallen is now on the eternal list of music I’ll never be able to listen to again without coming undone. Looking back on it from the vista of 20 years, I can see that Dark Valley-

and I see the road led here. You came home.

But what of the ones didn’t?

They are etched on our hearts, a tattoo that speaks every moment of the ones that never came home:

You are not forgotten.

Tonight I will gather my precious things - the tattered flag that hung outside my door for the entirety of the war; the blue star banner that hung in my window; and my Father’s folded flag. I’m going to lay them to rest, as the Daughter, Sister, Mother, Aunt who was never the one who went to war; but I still came away with scars of my own.

We are still here, you and I. We are the ones who survived, the ones who came home and tried to remember what it was you were fighting for. And the ones we left behind are still there, between the crosses row on row...

The real cost of war will never be known except to those who have paid the price. You know who you are. You know the cost;

and those of us who love you know, too.

The cost was us.