Fred

Fred posts comments here fairly often. I've never met him, but he's the kind of fan who warms a writer's heart, because he seems to have read everything of mine he can get his hands on, he's always nice and polite, and he keeps reading. I'm lucky to have him as a fan of my work, and I know it.

To be honest, though, Fred always seemed to have a little too much free time. I wondered how he could read so much and so quickly, and sometimes in stretches he'd make so many posts I'd joke about it to local friends and family.

You see, I took a few bits of data and considered them enough to make a joke about a person.

What an asshole I was.

Fred has time on his hands because he lost his job. He lost his job because he was in the South Tower when the plane hit it on 9/11 and because of what happened to him in the ensuing months as he tried to deal with the horror of that area and his own situation. Fred suffers from PTSD, something I understand very well, but there's no government agency to help, because he got away "safely." I know all this and consider it acceptable to discuss here because of Fred's blog entry on his 9/11 experience, which I strongly encourage you to read.

Fred says in this entry that he's not a hero. He names a fire fighter, John Collins, a man who died in the Towers, as a hero. He's right that Collins is a hero. He's wrong that he isn't. He stayed on his floor longer than necessary so he could help others get out. That's an act of heroism--no, not on the level of what Collins did, but an act of heroism nonetheless.

I read Fred's post late last night, and then I sat in my chair for an hour and thought about it. I thought about my personal hells, and his, and those of so many others who end up with PTSD: the soldiers and the rescue workers and the battered children and the survivors of so many other types of horrors I'm sure I couldn't even name them all. If you draw the typical hand in life, bad things happen to you, but you never end up in the kinds of situations that cause PTSD. If you draw one of the unlucky hands, however, you end up wondering what's happening to you, feeling guilty about it, and most of all feeling alone.

You're not alone.

Fred, you never saw me act like a jerk by making a joke about you, but I did. I meant no harm, and I know I could have kept it myself and you'd never have known, but that would be chickenshit. You've earned better.

I'm sorry, Fred.

When the dream comes, when the news reports or some damn scene in a movie trigger the tears or the anger you can't explain, when you're not sure you can hold it together a second longer, know at least this: You're not alone, and you have a fan who appreciates what you did.

I'm definitely buying the first round when we finally meet.