David McElroy

What if the one who got away came back?

Most of us have a love who got away — someone who our feelings turn to in secret moments — someone we still love, who will forever make us quietly ask, “What if…?”

At first, I thought it was just me. Over the last six or eight weeks, I can’t stop my heart from reviewing the past. I can’t stop some internal mechanism from reviewing every old love and giving me revised conclusions.

It’s as though my heart has a brain of its own. It takes all the inputs from the past and then adds the changes going on in the world and renders an updated conclusion about different loves from the past.

Then I realized it isn’t just me. People I know personally are talking with me about making changes to their relationships — ditching something that doesn’t work or reaching out to someone they wish had turned out differently — in ways they wouldn’t have imagined a few months ago.

For some, it’s a time to fix things which have gone wrong or a time to escape relationships which have died or to reach out in vulnerability to love which was lost.

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In February of 1973, a U.S. Air Force C-141A transport plane took off from Hanoi, Vietnam, headed toward the Philippines. As the wheels pulled off the ground, 40 jubilant men screamed with joy and relief.

They were the first planeload of nearly 600 American prisoners of war being released from North Vietnamese prisons, where they had been tortured and abused for much of the previous decade.

I can’t imagine what it would have been like to be one of those released prisoners, but it’s even harder to imagine how these men stayed sane — most for years — while they waited for the end. And since they were tortured and abused, they never knew whether they would survive to return home or if they would be killed instead.

I’ve been thinking today about those men because they offer some clues about how different people handle extreme stress. As I keep hearing people talk about how much stress everybody is under right now — with many locked at home in quarantine with their families — I’ve found myself thinking about ex-POW Jim Stockdale.

He said one thing separated those who thrived in captivity from those who were destroyed. It offers an important clue for us today.

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I pass the sign every day and never notice it.

Stop.

But as I walked through my neighborhood late Tuesday night, my eyes were suddenly drawn to the crooked red sign. It grabbed my attention and wouldn’t let go. This is what I had been struggling for the last week to say.

Stop!

I’ve been in a funk for days, but I haven’t known exactly what was going on. I’ve felt angry. I’ve felt resentful. I’ve felt something powerful that needed to come out. Whatever it was has been strong enough to make me keep to myself more than usual. I’ve been slow to respond to phone calls and emails and everything else.

Stop! Everything needs to stop!

As I stood there in the street with this bright red sign screaming at me, something suddenly clicked. It wasn’t rational. It was an angry and chaotic desire to raise my voice here on this silent midnight street and demand that the insane world stop what it’s doing. I needed everyone to hear me.

I need this chaos to stop.

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