#yourhereforareason

Stuck in a Confederate prison for the past five months, living on hardtack and soup, starving and thinking he was not going to live through the winter, my 19 year old great, great, great grandfather scribbled his thoughts down by candlelight.

They are not nice thoughts. He hasn’t seen his family since he joined the war in 1863, a skinny teenager who lied about his age to enlist. He’s watched his best friends die, survived five battles, and endured the harsh treatment of confederate guards. Now imprisoned in the dead of winter he is a living skeleton.  Growing weaker from lack of nourishment, he begins to lose hope.

“Confined within these gloomy walls, a prisoner of despair.”

His notes in his journal usually speak of the weather and news of the war, but now they are dark and heavy.

It’s my birthday....January 26th, 1865.

Of course I wouldn’t be born until two centuries later, but Charles did not know this. He knows only his hunger and his fear, and the bleak walls that surround him.

If only he could look past all that, into the future and see me, reading his words, living proof that he survives his darkest hour, that he has a family, that he dies old and happy.

It makes me think, what would have happened if he had given up? If he had in his moment of misery decided to take his own life? Where would I be? I wouldn’t exist. I wouldn’t be here writing this.

My existence depended on a 19 year old boy who somehow managed to survive a brutal civil war, who somehow avoided flying bullets that could have easily killed him. Who somehow was captured alive and eventually escaped prison.  Who could have easily been taken ill with malaria or pneumonia, the diseases that killed his friends, and perished.  Thousands die, but he lives.  And for what purpose? So I can one day be born?  So that I could write this? 

The images of civil war POW prisoners are horrible.  They look like the people in World War II concentration camps, living skeletons, every rib showing.  By the time Charles does escape, he’s so wasted away his own parents don’t recognize him.  

And then I think of all my other ancestors, all the people who survived the middle ages, the bloody wars, the plagues and the horrors, enslavement and holocausts.  I think of all the chance encounters, the love at first sights, the romances that happened in order for me to be born.   

How many love stories had to be told to create you?  How many sacrifices had to be made?  How many tears had to fall? How many people did the universe have to bring together?

 Is your existence a random dice roll, a one in a trillion chance?  Or was it fate?  Where you meant to be?

They did not have to fall in love, they did not have to fight.  They could have given up, ended their struggles, but they didn’t. 

There must be a reason I am here.  But like Charles, so many, many years ago, I can’t see past the walls of my prison.  My life has been long and difficult, full of the depression so many of us struggle with.  Many times I’ve come close to suicide, but something has always stopped me.

There must be a reason, and maybe that reason is someone else, someone who will exist because of me, someone I can’t see, far off in the future, reading the words I write now, wishing they could tell me that it all turns out okay.  That I will be okay.