Weight of Weariness

Trigger Warnings: Mentions suicide, violence, and death.

I stressed over that outfit. What does one wear when one is going to speak to an elite committee of esteemed state Senate members? I settled on a casual but nice pair of navy woven clamdiggers and a flowy white blouse; it was something I’d wear to a PTA meeting. Surely the Virginia state Senate was a little less judgy about these things than PTA moms (because everyone knows how brutal they can be…) so it’d be okay. I didn’t trust the flowy top not to wrinkle, so I squeezed my upper half into a camisole and screamed “don’t look at me!” at my husband as I ran out to the car with my middle bulging and my nicer shirt draped over my arm. As I navigated my Nissan Murano through the predictably awful traffic of Hampton Roads, I hit play on my latest audiobook. 2 hours later I arrived in the Capitol City.

Richmond’s the big city, and I was pretending to be big-city sophisticated, so I handed over a $30 parking fee without blinking. It was only after I said thank you to the attendant and eased into a tight spot within the garage that I realized I still hadn’t thrown my nicer shirt over my camisole. Finally properly dressed, I found my way to the famed Women’s Monument where I attempted to draw strength from the heroines of Virginia- figures like Martha Washington, Maggie Walker, and Virginia Randolph. Taking advantage of the quiet moment, I whispered my rehearsed speech in their ears. They didn’t indicate how they felt about it.

This was it. For the previous three months, I’d been embroiled in a statewide fight to restore education benefits for the children of disabled veterans, Gold Star families, and First Responders who died in the line of duty. It ought to have been an easy fight- a knock-out. Who in their right mind strips a college waiver benefit from the child of a slain law enforcement officer or a severely disabled veteran? No one. No one in their right mind does that. For a while there, I’d assumed it had to be a terrible mistake. Some errant file clerk must have injected the wrong language in the 650+ page state budget, or maybe someone indulged in a little therapeutic herbal remedy and a demon had possessed them when they accidentally included the language. Whatever caused the mistake, it would be fixed. No politician could possibly afford to take credit for this debacle.

When word first got out about the changes a collective ripple of shock ran through the veteran and Gold Star community. Reaction was swift and strong. I knew that it would be okay. Surely, whoever had inserted the language would understand, finally, the impact of their words. They’d get it that these were real families who had already sacrificed so much and had made irreversible financial and personal decisions based on the existence of the VMSDEP waiver program. People had literally turned down job offers and support systems in other states to stay in Virginia. Our representatives would get that and they’d fix this mistake.

I expected too much from our elected representatives. My Dad is a Vietnam era veteran. He’s got pretty severe Parkinson’s today, attributed to his exposure to Agent Orange. That was the Bad War. Back in the Bad War, servicemembers came home to protests and spitballs and a whole lot of broken promises. The ticker-tape parades of wars of yore were just a fond memory for those who served in the 60s and 70s. This is the 2020s though! We’re the folks who served in the post-9/11 era. Remember back when America loved the post-9/11 military? Somehow, I’d failed to notice things had changed again. Apparently, when you fight 20+ years of war you collect a lot of war-wounded and war-dead. You also collect a whole lot of people who are permanently and forever injured and changed due to events in training, patrols and expeditions outside of official combat zones, and due to toxic exposures to carcinogenic materials burned, used, and bathed in daily. Folks like to go to Veterans Day and Memorial Day parades. They don’t like to pay for the benefits of the wounded and dead, though. They especially don’t like to pay for them if it means tapping into a $5 BILLION state budget surplus. Politicians like surpluses. They like to use that number in campaign ads. They can’t use that number if they redirect a small portion of it to cover the costs of education benefits for the kids of the wounded and dead.

“Ballooning costs,” blustered certain red-faced politicians. They weren’t red in the face because they felt shame. They were red in the face because they’d been caught snatching back funds from kids whose fathers died from suicide after facing inescapable PTSD.

“Don’t worry, we’re going to figure out a way to make this sustainable for everyone…” claimed certain remarkably calm-sounding folks wearing cream-colored Chanel suits and subtle-red Guerlain lipstick. If anyone ever knew anything about sustainability, it was surely Coco Chanel, she lived through the leaner times of the Good War after all.

Then our growing cohort of voices began to examine the numbers. Those ballooning costs. How much can an unfunded mandate actually cost, anyway? Why didn’t anyone’s figures match? Why were universities claiming one cost and the State Council for Higher Education claiming another and the Department of Veterans Services claiming another and independent analysts claiming yet another? If no one can agree on the exact number of participants or the real cost of attendance per participant or a realistic number of projected future participants, how can the children of women who cannot work anymore because their cancer-ridden bodies won’t allow it be denied their promised benefit?

With the growing chorus of outrage and the retraction of support for the detested changes from the state Governor and the welcome addition of allies within the state legislature, they’d finally fix this mess, right?

And then there was the public commentary period. A task force of friends and foes sat at the head of a room and listened patiently for 4.5 hours as veterans and the wives and children of service members and first responders who had died in the line of duty were forced to relive their pain at a podium. Everyone cried. Everyone applauded. Promises were again made. Now, now that a veteran suffering crippling PTSD, who is normally housebound and unable to stand crowds, had bravely stepped forward to share his trauma and turmoil- now they’d fix it. They’d get it right this time.

Not yet. There’s a process for everything in politics and while it’s apparently easy to sneak a paragraph into a 650+ page state budget that strips education benefits from the children of firefighters who die while fighting flames in a warehouse, it’s apparently really, really hard to undo it. The Republicans were going to get it done though. So were the Democrats. They were all going to be heroes for our heroes. Forgive me Martha Washington and Maggie Walker and Virginia Randolph, I lost my some of my optimistic spirit. When I heard the promises, I felt the sneaking trickle of cynicism overtake me. For days, I became convinced that despite the stories of the men who returned home with forever-damaged spines and the women who returned home with forever-damaged souls, our legislators might still let us down.

Then they came through! They wrote a new bill that restored the benefits that would allow the spouses of police officers who were shot while responding to a routine domestic disturbance, to go back to school and gain a degree to find their own employment. The bill miraculously had bipartisan sponsorship- a rarity that can be compared to stumbling upon an albino gazelle juggling perfectly ripe avocados in the wilds of a Walmart parking lot. We counted the votes, because that’s what you do when you’re watching pending legislation, and we knew we had a shot. There was opposition, one senate leader decided she’d prefer to exclude the kids of Navy sailors who’d suffered TBIs while training off the coast of Jacksonville and the husbands of Coast Guard women who’d broken their pelvises while chasing drug runners off the Baja in small craft. She was putting forward her own bill. All of that led me to that statue garden, because finally, one way or another, this was about to end. The good bill vs the bad bill. It was an important enough moment, I’d stuffed myself into a too-tight cami and a flowy white shirt to give a 2-minute speech I hoped would touch some hearts.

After the speech, I sat down with rows full of veterans and family members, the guy with the permanent nerve damage and the woman who has been raising her child alone for 18 years and all of the other battered, bruised, but not broken people who had given so much for so long. I prayed silently for our words to have touched hearts, our facts to have touched minds. I handed our fate to our representatives and I awaited their vote. Which bill would they vote for? The good one or the bad one?

And then, when that one Senator refused to put either bill on the floor for a vote, I was reminded that some wars never end. We’d descended upon the glorious Capitol City from around the state. We’d shared our private pain. We’d sat patiently for eight long hours… and at the end of the day, nothing happened. Nothing at all. After a bit of incredulous debriefing, we all went our separate ways. I drove the two hours home and walked in my front door nearly twelve hours to minute from the time I’d left that morning. I peeled the flowy shirt off and threw on a ratty Dropkick Murphy’s tee and sprawled out on the couch.

“You done now?” My husband asked.

I thought about it for a minute. I thought about the woman I’d met who had been raising her son alone ever since her husband passed from his service-connected cancer.

I sighed, annoyed at myself because I knew the answer too quickly and part of me wished it would be a different answer.

“Nah. Can you throw this shirt in the washer?”

For more information about the attempt to erode VMSDEP benefits for the dependents of severely disabled veterans, Gold Star families, and the family members of Virginia’s First Responders go to: https://vmsdepfriends.org/