A Time to Heal
Can Falling in Love Help You Heal?
In the novels of my series, Once Upon a Time in the Texas Panhandle, I don’t avoid killing, because killing is a part of life. … Ecclesiastes, Chapter 3, states it plainly: “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: … A time to kill.” However, it seems most writers in telling their stories forget to include the second half of Verse 3, which, after saying “A time to kill,” then says, “and a time to heal.” I focus on this—healing after having killed. Instead of giving brutal details of the killing scene, I focus on the effect afterwards on the killer—what killing has done to his or her mind, which is often called PTSD. However justified I am for killing someone, I have to live with what I have done … and find a way to heal. That’s my focus.
People kill for all sorts of reasons. I was struck by the words of Deontay Wilder, the reigning WBC heavyweight champion, who told the interviewer before his recent fight with Luiz Ortiz, “Every time I walk into the ring my mind-set is to kill my opponent in the ring—nothing else. … When I risk my life for other people’s entertainment, why would I care about their opinions? … They know what it is, and they love it.” Fortunately, Ortiz didn’t die, but a lesser man certainly would have. Wilder “connected with a bone-rattling right to the head of Ortiz … in the seventh [round], dropping and stopping the Cuban.” It was for the entertainment of a crowd of 10,000, and they loved it. And probably, if Ortiz had never woken up, they would have loved it even more.
But rather than playing and replaying the “spectacular one-hitter-quitter knockout” by Wilder of Ortiz, I think about what would now be going on in Wilder’s mind, if he had actually killed Ortiz. Of course, it would have been perfectly legal and scored simply as a win-by- knockout, to make Wilder’s record, “42-0-1, 41 KOs.” But how would being a killer affect Wilder’s psyche? Would he be like Sean Thornton (John Wayne) in the movie, The Quiet Man, who after killing an opponent in the ring in America, leaves boxing and returns to his native Ireland to live anonymously and in peace. Would Wilder return to Alabama, buy a farm, and try to find peace?
In two of my novels, the protagonist young man is a decorated war hero. One has been rewarded for killing hundreds of enemy soldiers in Korea, the other for shooting down dozens of enemy planes in the war against Japan. The military lauds them, gives them medals, but they have an impossible time living with killing. Drinking doesn’t heal. Attempted suicide doesn’t heal. In another of my novels, the millionaire father of a young man attempts to murder his son’s Native American fiancée. The father ends up hating himself and hated by his son. In another novel, two brothers serve on opposite sides in the American Civil War—the one becoming a hero in the Union Army, the other a hero in the Confederate Army, and both are decorated for valor in killing “the enemy.” Either brother feels justified in killing—both believing that they are fighting for the right cause. But after the war, they both have nightmares about the soldiers of the other side that they killed. And the soldier who was in the Confederate Army is doubly conflicted, having fought to defend slavery, which he comes to see as the wrong cause and thus he was in the wrong army.
In these stories, healing comes from falling in love with a compassionate and understanding young lady, who helps her lover carry his burden. The pain and bad memories will never go away. But love heals. And bearing the burden together, the couple will be able to live happily ever after.