Laughing at Pandas

Listening to Chris laugh with his daughter out in the garage after these past weeks makes me smile. His ability to still find humor is amazing. We talk so often about death and the things that happened in Iraq that his laughter is precious. I draw it in whenever I can and keep it close.

My mind wanders. He once told me they ask for their mothers.

He wanted to know why dying men do that but I didn’t have an answer for him. I don’t know why mothers are so important at the moment of a soldier’s death. Maybe the mind seeks comfort when it knows the body is failing. Mothers kiss scraped knees and solve all the world’s problems with only a word when we’re children. Maybe this is why.

And my attention shifts back to today. They’re out in the garage laughing about pandas and how evolution has been cruel to these giant ill-tempered slow-moving raccoons. It’s good to hear because of the other things I’ve heard. He owns resilience. The military gave it to him.

He once talked about a man who died in his arms in the field. There was nothing he could do. This man begged to be saved. He had a daughter that needed him. But there was nothing. The soldier was too injured, too far gone.

"I felt him die," Chris said. His body went limp, and then his eyes went vacant. No flash, no heavenly light. Just nothing. Alive then dead.

Chris knows details because he was, and still is at heart, a combat medic. The pupils go big when a person dies. They get like black marbles covering almost the entire iris. Though I know it is simply the muscles of the body releasing their last electrical impulses, it must be odd to see. I hope to never witness it.

The man that day died. That little girl never got to see her father again. But there are many daughters and sons whose fathers did come home because of combat medics, because of Chris. They came home different maybe, but they came home.

Maybe this is why he can still laugh. Even though he agonizes over those he lost, maybe the ones he saved give him the strength. However he does it, I am happy to laugh with him because  some months, these days are too few.