It’s an often overlooked tragedy: caregivers battling every day with emotions of love and helplessness, empathy and isolation, while caring for service members severely wounded with physical or psychological damages. These veterans have survived injuries that change not only their own lives but also those who care for them. To call caregivers unsung heroes is to understate the depths of their compassion, their commitment, and their dedication.
Programs such as Helen Deutsch Writing Workshops offer caregivers a much-needed opportunity to connect with one another, find support and camaraderie, and develop a way to tell their stories, giving voice to those who previously may have been unprepared to talk about their lives. A partnership of the Wounded Warriors Project and Writers Guild of America, East Foundation, the workshops were initially offered in 2008 for veterans and active-duty military — some in their teens and 20s — from Afghanistan and Iraq. In 2011, WGAE Foundation also developed a program led by writing mentors specifically for caregivers of wounded veterans.
Seth Brady Tucker is one of these mentors. An award-winning author and combat veteran, Tucker uses his own experience “writing poetry at the bottom of a foxhole” to now assist others who have a story to tell. Tucker’s own story, “Mormon Boy,” was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award in 2013.
Tucker is an instructor at Colorado School of Mines, is on the faculty at Denver’s Lighthouse Writers Workshop, and volunteers in prisons bringing literature to inmates.
The connection between language, literature and empathy has long been widely held; Tucker now points to scientific data that links empathetic behavior with storytelling. Workshop mentors like Tucker encourage participants to direct their often-conflicted emotions into writing — privately, for family and friends, or for larger audiences through poems, short fiction and essays, memoirs, blogs, novels or screenplays.
Tucker was one of several mentors who conducted a writing workshop for caregivers earlier this month in Denver, participating in part because of his military service in Iraq, but also because he believes that both veterans and their caregivers can feel abandoned when the service member returns home. Veterans honorably discharged, decorated with medals and ribbons, and allotted a percentage of disability from the VA will often describe a sense of isolation, while caregivers deal with their own feelings of helplessness and even worthlessness.
Tucker will continue to work long distance for another six months with members of his mentoring group, who came to Denver from around the country. Some might write memoirs, others may begin cobbling together letters they wrote, and some may find their outlets in journaling. In May, participants will come together for another two-day session.
Tucker believes that literature saves, and that writing has changed the trajectory of his own life after his service as an airborne paratrooper in the Gulf. His goals as a mentor include, in his own words, “not to break down and cry every 10 minutes” as he encounters caregivers who strive to remain upright, uplifted and positive about the lives they now lead.
For the caregivers, these writing workshops can provide an avenue to share common experiences, to express emotions they often keep bottled up, and to discover writing as a way to tell stories that are meaningful for them.
For Tucker, mentoring writers to tell these stories is his way of honoring the sacrifices of not only the wounded veterans but also their caregivers, shedding light on a largely invisible price of war.
Andrea W. Doray is a communication consultant, writer and editor, and is a youth writing instructor at Lighthouse Writers Workshop. Contact her at a.doray@andreadoray.com. For more on the Writers Guild Initiative of the WGAE Foundation, go to dev.wgaef.org.
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