Phantom Pain

Amputees often feel a pain from a part that has been taken. It’s called phantom pain. An arm or leg is gone, but the pain in it somehow remains in the absence. A marker of something essential now and forever missing. The body remembers being whole. And pain…that ghostly phantom pain, is the only way it has remind us of all we once were. 1968 is that year for me. The year something essential was taken. That was long ago. But I still feel it. That year in America brought terrible collisions between old virtues and new verities. Truths taken on faith were tested and sometimes failed. Families were shaken to the bone by wars declared and fought in jungles but also those undeclared fought over kitchen tables. It was the year I discovered loss. Not the temporary disappointments or wounds of childhood. The other kind. The kind that climbs down and in. The kind that changes you. It whispers who you were is no more. This year, 2026, has begun to feel like then. I recognize something in it. Something coming. 1968 began when a kid I knew was expelled from my Catholic grammar school for the grave sin of wearing Beatle boots. We both wore white shirts and clip on ties, we memorized the sacraments and blessed ourselves and we believed what we were taught. Liberty and justice…for all. But the nuns declared this kid as different. He was a heretic. In a time of flat tops and crew cuts his hair was over his ears. And though we learned to read together, memorized the commandments and confessed our sins each Friday that year, they said, he had become different. One morning, hands over hearts pledging our allegiance in the parking lot, the principal dragged him out of line. She sent a mimeograph sheet home to all the parents reminding them of the dress code. When his parents resisted, the principal sent him packing. Off to the prayer deprived, pledge-less heathens of public school. My teachers whispered he was a bad seed. Sure to become a thug. All the while I practiced my own private heresy. Stealing cartons of Lucky Strikes, learning to inhale behind the school and dreaming of my escape into puberty. Beatle boots were, as it turned out, just the beginning. By 1968 a war that had started in a faraway jungle a few years earlier began to find its way home. It crept into our living room each night through the television screen. After supper the tv showed jungle firefights and then demonstrations in our cities. American soldiers calling for medics and protestors, not much older than me, beaten bloody in city streets. And every night the black and white flicker of the slow roll of the names of American boys that died fighting for something almost none of us could explain in class. The night LBJ decided he would not run again I found my mother, face in her hands weeping at the kitchen table. Not for him I can see now, but instead for what she sensed was coming. Something as certain as a freight train with all we believed waiting on its tracks. There was an old man down the street whose oldest son had gone into the marines. Killed in combat that year. A widower and regular at the American Legion, he had a bad ticker. The doctors told him he wouldn't last the year without a transplant. As he began to fail, the parish ladies, unsure of how to help, started a school bake sale. They believed, I suppose, that everything bitter, could somehow be made sweet with confectionary sugar. So they made cakes that we sold after Mass on Sunday. I was elected to bring him the envelope. I rang his bell then earnestly told him that we raised $47...to help with the medical bills. I guess I expected him to be happy, maybe even grateful. But as I handed it to him he began to soundlessly cry, then without a word slowly closed the door. I stood alone on his doorstep suddenly worried that I had done something wrong. Or that there was something else, something deeply flawed about a human heart, something dangerous, that I could not see. And it was stalking him…and maybe all the rest of us too. That spring some kid one town over wrapped his daddy’s Buick around a tree. I overheard my father tell a neighbor the kid wore bell bottoms. Hair was over his ears. A hippie. By then the old man was terribly sick and they decided to give him the boy's heart. After the operation he almost died. The doctors said that his body kept rejecting the heart. I suppose it must have felt like every beat was a betrayal of his soldier son. But by summer he had recovered enough to walk around the block with a cane. As the year deepened draft cards were burned, tempers began to fray, rioting broke out at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. And kids, not much more than teenagers, sensed they were being lied to, that every thing they had been told was good and true was merely a mask for power and avarice. Soon the entire country started to seem just like the old man. Clinging to a tired and worn out heart and unable to do anything but reject the very thing that could save it. In my house my oldest brother, all of 19, was called to the draft board. Like everyone I knew then, he was impossibly young and certain of what was right. True in the way that only the innocent can afford. He said he didn’t want to fight in a war on the other side of the world. He said it felt wrong. My father, an immigrant and World War 2 veteran, told him that this country had been good to us. That the United States stood for right and that our family owed a debt that he had been called to pay. And so there were fights. The quiet kind. The kind that no longer used fists or even words but instead collided in sharpened silence at the dinner table each night. The wreckage was hidden, but no less severe. And love, its nightly casualty, began to roll away like the names of the dead each night on the news. My brother finally agreed to go to the draft board and was rejected. 4F, asthma. But no matter. The war, between my father's faith and my brother's growing distrust continued until finally my father, with tears in his eyes, told my brother to pack and leave. Hemingway famously wrote that the world can break just about anything, but that some things become stronger in the broken places. But 1968, its fractured families and broken faith, did not feel strong to me. Some boys I suppose, are strong at 19. Many leave much younger. I myself, an unrepentant fool, left at 16. But my brother, was not strong. I watched him pack and listened to him lie to me that everything would be all right. And, just a boy, I felt something wrong in it all. Like stealing or lying or not standing up when everything in you whispers you must...or be lost forever. I went to my father and told him that he was making a mistake. I pleaded with him. Something's wrong, I said. There must be some kind of sin there isn't a commandment for. The kind you’ll never be able to forgive yourself for. The kind you'll carry all your days. He gazed at me in silence with a look I did not recognize and finally said, “You don’t understand. You’re too young to know.” It was years before I understood. But I understand that look now. It was grief. The day my brother left I stood at the front door watching. The old man, slowly limping down the street, stopped by him. They talked for a moment. And I watched as the old man, put a hand on his scarred and unsteady heart, then tenderly touched my brother's arm. He whispered something. And my brother bowed his head like it was some kind of absolution passed only between the wounded. Then he turned away forever. That year, 1968, was long ago but I feel its fracture still. I feel it like a fault line running through my country, my family, my heart. I still feel the phantom pain of the part cut away from me, gone these many years. And I became stained by the memory of the way things were supposed to fit, but never would again. Nixon resigned, the war ended, and the country, like the old man’s heart, eventually grew stronger. And, though it took some few years, my brother died alone. Of that year's wounds. But 1968, its quiet wars and rejected hearts, its riots and unforgotten sins became a bruise on my memory. Its self inflicted wounds crawled into my twelve year old eyes then down until they finally reached my heart that now, like the old man's, sometimes feels worn out and tired of beating against this world. And now 2026, has begun to feel to me like 1968. I can feel it coming like a freight train. And once again all we believe lay in its tracks. I feel that its dark shape rushing toward us and feel its coming collision begin to cast a shadow of undeclared war. Now masked gunmen with badges abduct laborers and gardeners and maids, sweeping them into unmarked cars. They disappear into deportation camps. No judges or lawyers. Constitutional rights and court orders suddenly optional. And just as suddenly American decency evaporates beneath the flame of online outrage. A people who sing about the home of the brave, suddenly …astonishingly silent. Afraid of standing up. Like some essential part of our American character was quietly amputated. All around a kind of mass hysteria has taken hold. A toxic mix of grievance fills airwaves and phone screens whispering that elections can no longer be trusted. It bellows that accountability and rule of law are vanities we can no longer afford. Talk of poisoned immigrant blood and dictators, vast deportation camps and retribution are now cheered by millions. Neo Nazis, faces covered like klansmen, march through the Capitol on Independence Day. Never mind that many of these rabid ideas were defeated in 1945. We are told that the last eighty years of defending democracy was a terrible mistake. That might makes right. That other countries are there for the taking. That we are not a nation of immigrants but only Europeans and Christians, under cultural assault, being replaced and ruined. These are old ideas. We have heard them before. In Italy and Germany and Japan. But today they are coated in a fresh veneer of patriotism and labelled righteous. And so good people… fathers and uncles, brothers and neighbors have been convinced. These misguided people want to cut out the heart of democracy and replace it with something smaller. Something meaner. They tell us again and again that the only way to save America, as they demand it should become, is to destroy America as it is. To dismantle it from within. To make law a surgical blade to amputate anything they label disease. And like 1968, I am beginning to feel that rending. Of families. Of country. Of my heart. I have seen this before. I know where it leads. I have watched its flicker and slow roll of loss. I still feel its mournful demands, still feel the phantom pain of missing parts. I hear them calling out to me from long ago. From my father’s eyes. We…each of us… have to decide. Will we honor the kind of people we still aspire to be or will we surrender to this other place. This colder America. I am Irish, which is another way of saying that I know in my bones that the world is meant to break your heart. But I am American too. Which is another way of saying I believe…pray really… that Hemingway was right. That the broken I feel barreling toward us will somehow...please God... in the end, make us stronger. WLM