Today was possibly the worst day of my life.

By way of analogy, let’s pretend I’m a medic with the British Expeditionary Force, helping hold the town of Ypres against the German advance in 1914. Bombs are dropped. Chlorine gas shells pepper the landscape. Bullets pierce eyes and heads and hearts. Carnage all around and my world is shattered; my innocence lost; pain and anguish and despair well up from the battlefield in a ragged chorus.

This is not the worst part. I’m the medic, and my job now is to wander among the cruel wreckage, looking for those who survived the initial shelling. Every time I see an upstretched arm, a feeble, bloodied amputee grasping at a last chance for life, I have to approach with eyes wide open and choke the last breath out of the survivor, until he forever lies still. In this way, hundreds of emotions and thousands of memories will be put to rest, once and for all. There can be none who come home, back to safe and comfortable shores; the culling must be complete, total, and merciless. Only in this way can the conflict be concluded.

Why must I do this? Take on this terrible, unwanted task? Because I caused the conflict, and I’ve committed myself to making amends and getting to closure, to finality, to pass from the realm of might-have-been to never-was. If there are casualties, they are on my shoulders and no one else’s. If it hurts to close the eyelids of a fresh-faced young lad from a small town in Washington, then the hurt is mine to bear.

As I crawl along the awful trenches, searching for those for whom I am the last judgment, I cry. This is not what I wanted. I did not ask for this, but I brought it to pass. And I know that I am not the only victim. There are no winners.

If there shoud be a distant shore to this terrible journey, a future beyond this painful transition, it will be populated with the ghosts of those already lost; the memories that I now have to bury; and maybe – just maybe – the hopes for a better outlook in a new land.