I have written about him before, most recently in the posts Merry Christmas, Reality Notwithstanding and Taking Him On Home. He’s Porthos, the fun-loving rake to the quieter, more relaxed Athos–and their deeply-loved, fallen comrade, Aramis.

Porthos and I have known each other for a while. Our relationship has always been warm–though, shall we say, complicated as well. As the middle of three strong-willed sons born to a strong-willed father, he knows how to make his wants and wishes known. Fear not that, I can assure you.

And I might add: I wouldn’t get into a scuffle with him. Some of the more foolhardy in his time have. They learned. Forthwith.

Yet can that boy pour on the charm, or what. His is a perfect mixture of the quite genuine and the quite consciously manipulative. He’s had more than his fair share of practice through the years.

He actually leaves me reeling much of the time, truth be told. I’m never quite sure whether I want to give him a warm rub on the top of his head or smack the living daylights out of him. Usually both.

Porthos, in other words, is one of those individuals about whom no one–and I mean, no one–can feel nonchalant.

I’ve taken my share of hits from VA colleagues about him. We’re a bit of a known pair, again, truth be told. Some have made it clear, for example, that they think that I “coddle” him. Many have intimated that I should be more “firm” with him, although none has been able to tell me exactly how such “firmness” should look.

Our struggles with each other have usually been around two subjects: medications, i.e., which kinds, how much, how often, etc., etc.; and psychotherapy, i.e., which kinds, how much, how often, etc., etc. Simple.

Although he and I have had our disagreements, he certainly has not been one merely to “demand” something and then pitch a fit if he were not to get what he’d wanted. Quite the contrary: he does his research, and our negotiations around various regimens have reached points of complexity that I can only call “admirable” on his part. Still, disagree, we have, and sometimes strongly. In the end, though, he has always acquiesced to the fact of life that ‘tis I, not he, who has the MD behind the name.

For example, about ten days ago.

Details are not relevant, but it had been one of our more intense, so-called discussions. He let me know in no uncertain terms that I had not started his weekend out on a pleasant footing. I let him know in similar terms that even though that had not been my intention, I could only be so upset thereabout.

We met the following Monday.

He had agreed to come in twice a week, at least for some focused, therapeutic contact, and he had agreed to hook himself up again with one of our intensive group programs. He had also agreed to two-week supplies of his medications, and he had agreed to the dosages I’d recommended.

But that was only a small part of the story.

He’d thought a lot during the weekend, about himself, his family, his sadness, his frustration over the physical limitations that have been plaguing him post-deployment. Of that, I had no doubt: when I opened the door to my office, he was standing there, with just enough of an impatient, “can we get going here, please?” edge to him to keep me on my toes, but with a countenance that more implored me to notice how worn-down he was, how very, very worn-down.

“Hey,” he said, most definitely without the exclamation point.

“Hey.”

“Do you mind if I put my leg up?” he asked, eyes darting to his left, my right, to the second chair in the room which often does its part to relieve his lower back of the pressure that can gnaw at him whenever he sits for any length of time.

“Of course. No problem.”

Soon we were both situated. For a few moments we just sat there, looking at each other, the semi-grin, semi-skepticism on his face, I’m sure, only a mirror of the same on mine.

“We still on speaking terms?” I finally ask, my semi-grin having turned full.

He rolled his eyes.

“I understand,” he replied, full-smiled as well, although for only briefly. “I know I’ve got to do something about myself. I . . .”  Suddenly, he shifted forward.  “Please, Doc, you understand, don’t you? How hard it is without her?”

“Her,” of course, is the young woman to whom he’d deeded not only his heart and soul, but a goodly portion of his every quantum of thought as well. They’d talked of marriage, of having children together, but then finally she’d decided that she could not make it work.

“Dad tells me that I’ve got to move on, but . . . I just can’t get him to understand. It’s not that easy. I don’t want to move on. I know that if she just knew how hard I’m trying . . . But she won’t return my calls, texts, nothing. I’m not going to be a stalker-type. I’m not going to go over to her place. No one’s going to accuse me of that, no one. But if she could just see me, see how hard I’m trying, see how much she means to me–God, Doc, she’d understand, wouldn’t she? Wouldn’t she? I mean, Doc, am I wrong? Can you understand why I just can’t give up yet, why I just can’t move on? Please, tell me you understand, please!”

Porthos is quite a handsome man. How we think the attractive never have to suffer, don’t we? How wrong we are. Anguish is just anguish, whether on the good-looking or on the plain.

“Porthos, here’s what I would say: don’t give up until you’re ready to give up. When it’s time, if it’s ever time, you’ll know. What you’ll then have to do is live out what you will already know. That will be the hard part.”

He looked at me, with a face both steeled and tear-stained. He has all the gear in place for “Leading Man” status, yet I’m hard-pressed to come up with a modern exemplar for him, given that most A-list stars today are simply too “pretty.” Perhaps a young Mark Harmon as the surgeon on the St. Elsewhere of the 1980’s, even then oozing the NCIS Gibbs-attitude that would one day make him America’s favorite Marine, back then painfully walking down that hospital hall for the final time, his character well-aware that he might soon die of AIDS.

“I sometimes just don’t know if I can do this, Doc,” he finally whispered. “I’m not going to kill myself or anything, but sometimes I’m afraid I won’t make it. It just hurts so, her, Aramis, the War, everything. It just so, so . . . hurts.”

The final word had plopped out of him, as if it had been teetering on his lip all the while, not wanting to risk the reality that would result from its mental equivalent having found voice, sound, transmitted out to a world, to me, to . . . what?

And then it happened: in the middle of his anguish, he started to look as if he were ready to fall asleep, to look as I imagined he must have looked at the end of that twenty-four hours he and Athos had had to stand watch over the body of Aramis, waiting for the helicopter to arrive: too exhausted to run, too charged to collapse.

And I realized: he wasn’t with me. He was in Iraq.

“No one has any idea, do they?’ I finally asked, too exhausted, too charged myself. “You’re there, right now, aren’t you.”

He was staring off to the side, grudgingly allowing one tear at a time past the checkpoint, his eyelids in a bizarre, internal arm-wrestling, the upper halves determined to shut this show down, the lower halves determined not to give in ever, do you hear me, ever!

“I’m sorry, Doc,” he whispered, his tears, few as they were, so robust, so proud to be Army-strong, his eyes fixated miles away. “I’m trying, really I am. I hope you believe me. Please believe me, Doc. Please.”

“I do,” I answered, hoping perhaps that some information, meager as it was, would jar us both out of the grip of those tears. “Listen, this is neurologic, Porthos. You see, trauma separates the part of the brain that feels, sees, hears from the part that makes sense of events, of Time, of those very feelings.

“They then stay separated, physiologically. You can only ‘remember’ if the front part of your brain can pull the ‘you that’s you,’, that is, your experience of the trauma, of yourself–your ‘Self’–away from the trauma enough to get the whole brain on the same page, the page that says ‘OK, this has happened, but that was then, this is now.’ Until then, it’s as if your brain is experiencing the trauma in an eternal present. You’re reliving it, not remembering it.

“That’s where the nightmares come from, the flashbacks. When you hurt because your girlfriend’s gone, you’re hurting not only because she’s gone, but because Aramis is gone, because all your buddies who died in the convoy are gone, because you had to pick up what was left of them, all of them. It’s as if your brain is saying, “Oh, my God, here we go again! We’ll never escape!

“Even when the front part of your brain knows–knows without a doubt–that it’s today, not back then; that it’s about your girlfriend, not about Aramis; that you’re in Indianapolis, not the desert: even then, it cannot yet grab onto that other part of the brain that is still feeling, hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting the destruction, the confusion, the adrenaline. The death.”

Pretty good, eh?

One problem, though, a big one:  with each of those words, I knew that I was both helping and hurting him, both assuring him that he was not crazy, yet reminding him that he felt crazy even so. His energy, his intense drive, his inner push never to give up, never: there they were, torturing him, yet keeping him alive, simultaneously, right in front of me, with my every verbal reminder of the truth, the Truth.

It was horrible to watch.

All I could think at the moment was, “My God, this is what they all go through, isn’t it, all these men and women, the ones whose Facebook posts, whose blogs I read, who talk of being walloped back and forth through Time, through emotion, psychically miles away from the loved one before them, then within nanoseconds careening right into them, then back, then in, tethered to a yo-yo only Satan himself could have manufactured–with a smile.”

I had to stop. Had to.

I had learned in a new way what I had never wanted to know. I was Katniss at the end of The Hunger Games, wasn’t I, gazing down at Cato, her nemesis, he nearly devoured by unearthly hounds, begging her, with his eyes only, to end it all, now, please, please.

Like Cato, Porthos looked at me, fortunately not devoured, yet no longer charged. Just exhausted.

“Will it ever get better, Doc?” he asked.

Fortunately, I am not Katniss. I have more than arrows to work with.

“Yes, it can,” I said as I leaned forward. “I’m learning a technique, EMDR, that stands for ‘Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing.’ I’ll give you a website to read about it. Check it out. Go ahead and read other stuff about it on Google, too. I’ll promise you: you’ll find a lot of hot-shot people with M.D. and Ph.D. degrees who’ll swear on a stack of Bibles that it’s hogwash and witchcraft. I once thought that myself. But I was wrong. The technique can help link that experiencing part of the brain with the contextualizing part, maybe not perfectly, but for many veterans, well enough to allow some real, meaningful healing to begin. You’d be one of the first that I try it out on, but I work with a smart teacher, and together, the three of us will find a way to discover how that powerful intensity inside you can save you, not destroy you.”

Still exhausted, but somewhere, unbelievably, still rakish, he closed his eyes, took in a deep breath, opened his eyes back up, looked into mine, and merely whispered, “If you say so, Doc. If you say so.”

I do say so. And I do believe so.

As best as I can determine, remember comes from a Latin root for memory. Yet there is something about the English word, re-member, as if member were a verb to mean “piecing together, putting the members of a body, a group back together.” Horror and grief without context are horror and grief eternal. When re-membered, though, sown back into the tapestry of Time, they hurt no less, but they need hurt no longer. Re-living can then become mere living. How good.

Yes, Porthos, how good.