I spend a good deal of my time being furious and grief-stricken over the death of everything I was ever loyal to. Don’t let my “poise” fool you. I suffer from this all the time.

This is part of war. You see people you are close to die. You face humiliation and the enemy tries his best to make you feel hopeless. Whether it is in combat or in the bloodier battle of drug recovery, you have to watch while people you are close to die or are crippled for life. You get no respite. In fact the moment when someone gets hit is the moment when you can least afford to give yourself up to grief.

In one incident someone said to me, “He’s DEAD!”

I could see that.

The guy kept saying “He’s DEAD.” as if he thought I didn’t CARE. I was busy trying to keep me and HIM from being dead.

About the fifth time he said “He’s DEAD!” I replied, “So what am ***I*** supposed to DO about it?”

Which is the point.

You can’t do anything about the dead. This is the simplest point in war. It is also the HARDEST point about war one has to learn to face. Almost every critical lesson in life and especially war consist of points that are simple but cruelly HARD on a normal human being.

And not just human beings.

One of the most heart-rending parts of Meerkat Manor was when the group poor doomed Mozart belonged to was down to two members. Mozart was still looking for danger, but the other meerkat was doing nothing but cuddling up to Mozart. It died that night.

I identified more with those two meerkats than I can with human beings who have never been betrayed.

Mozart had been kicked out of her troop a couple of times, so she had experience of being alone, a situation which normally kills meerkats. She tried again and almost made it back.

Mozart certainly took every chance to cuddle with her dwindling fellows in the shrinking tribe. Almost all meerkats begin in a big group and then either never have offspring or start their own. Almost any large meerkat group has been at what we would call Valley Forge more than once. PLEASE don’t obsess on the historical example I give.

Stick with my POINT.

All meerkats cuddle. As the group gets smaller, they do so more desperately.

By the same token, all humans grieve. Humans need to grieve But when a meerkat does nothing BUT cuddle, he is lost.

All of us humans need to VENT. We need to see our anger and loss and express it to each other. But when all we do is talk about how bad things are, we are lost.

We can all see this. This is appoint which is simple but not EASY. In meerkat, there is a very fine line between doing the cuddling that is necessary for survival and giving up the ghost. All meerkat tribes go through this stage repeatedly.

Those who can deal with unbearable losses and go on survive. Those who fall short on that thin line between grieving and giving up the ghost die.

When we deal with the phenomenon of defeatism, there is no easy away to state it. Nothing is harder than rational grieving. But that line is the one that determines survival in ALL social animals.