The Walking Dead: Sharing our TWD Family stories

We all have jobs to do

Sonya says:

I don’t talk about this often, but The Walking Dead was what helped me get through my then husband’s second deployment to Afghanistan. He had done a 13-month deployment in 2008-2009 and then went back again 2010-2011. He was a medic with a unit that was occupying a forward operating base in the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan. I didn’t hear from him much because communication was extremely difficult at their location.

I always assumed not hearing from him was good because if he was dead someone would have told me. Silence meant he was alive, or at least the possibility he was alive.

We had lived on base for a couple of years it still felt like a foreign world to me. Living on base was supposed to make me feel safe, but it just made me feel caged. I never got used to the sounds of gunfire from the training range or Blackhawk helicopters flying over the house.

Spouses dealt with the stress of deployment in many ways. Some took out their fear and frustration on others, some drank, some popped anti-depressants like they were candy. My coping method was The Walking Dead.

At one point I hit the limit of what I could deal with. I hadn’t heard from my husband in weeks. There were reports of injuries and casualties coming in daily. Two friends lost their husbands within a week of each other. My beloved kitty died and I hit an emotional wall. I shut down.

I couldn’t get off the couch or function. I stopped eating. I didn’t sleep for days until I’d pass out from sheer exhaustion. I refused to return calls from family or friends. I wouldn’t leave the house because I was convinced I’d be the next one to get a visit from the casualty notification officers.

Season 2 had just finished when this happened. I started watching my DVR’d  The Walking Dead season 1 and I watched it all the way through season 2. Once. Then again. Then again.

The world of The Walking Dead felt like my world. Familiar, but unfamiliar. Comfortable, but threatening. It was this weird hybrid world that I was struggling to make sense of. As Rick, Glenn, Maggie, Carol, Daryl, and the rest of them tried to figure out how to navigate the menace in their world I tried to navigate mine. Hershel’s wisdom and faith comforted me like it comforted Rick. The farm was my happy place. Still is. As characters I related to so much processed their own trauma, and loss, and fear, I was processing mine.

Slowly I started to get off the couch for periods for time. “We all have jobs to do.” became my mantra. Functioning was my job. I got up. I started functioning. I made it through the rest of that deployment, through the chaos of my husband’s PTSD and multiple TBIs and other injuries. Through his next deployment, to Iraq.  Through 7 moves across 5 states in 6 years. When I couldn’t make sense of the strangeness of the world I was living in I would return over and over to The Walking Dead world. I wouldn’t have been able to get off that couch without it.

I’m excited to see where The Walking Dead goes next and I love the changes the show has made but I will always have a special place in my heart for those early seasons because they helped me through some of the toughest times of my life.