The scars that time does not heal

When I think back to where I was exactly 20 years ago this week, it’s blurry.

The memories are a muddle of holidays with cousins and summer camps. Especially when it comes to peak summer. Okay, okay, mayyyyybe some of those memories stretch back a little further than 20 years, but that is exactly my point. It’s all blurry.

If I’m honest, I was probably working in hotels while other people were on their holidays. Either way, those memories conjure a familiar sense of nostalgia and warmth.

Twenty years doesn’t seem so long ago at all. And yet, so much has changed.

While my memories of that summer are hazy, warm, and interchangeable with summers around them, my husband’s memories of August 2006 are crystal clear.

Twenty years ago, we didn’t know each other.  While I was somewhere in a blur of summer holidays and hotel shifts, Steven knows exactly where he was. In the trenches in Lebanon, at war.

For me, 2006 has softened around the edges. For him, there are parts of it that never have, and maybe never will. 

Over time, I’ve found that those memories and dates have become part of my life, too. I may not have known him yet, and I wasn’t waiting for him to come home. But I know the man who lives with what came home with him. That’s the strange thing about loving someone whose trauma belongs to a time before you.

You learn the stories. You mark the dates. You start recognising the signs when something is brewing. You can even learn which memories belong to which places and which sounds can transport someone back to a time they’d prefer not to remember. An experience that they may wish would blur in their memory. An invisible scar that remains even when given all the time in the world. 

There are parts of the person you love that were formed in places you never visited with them, through experiences you can only try to understand. Sometimes, they may not even fully understand how those experiences have shaped them or how they will continue to affect them. And you begin to live alongside the parts of their past that have followed them into the present.

Sometimes they appear in a reaction that seems bigger than the moment. In a sound. A request. A date. A situation that you might otherwise have thought was ordinary. 

This is what it means to build a life with someone who carries trauma from a time before you knew them. You don’t inherit their memories. You cannot inherit their memories. But you live with the echoes.

We have built an entire life since then.  Thousands of memories that belong to both of us. And yet, every year, August arrives with its two very different versions of personal history.

As time moves forward, it adds distance between us and previous events. It fills the years with new places and new memories. And sadly, new shared traumas. But distance does not always bring peace. There are scars that time does not heal.

Twenty years have passed since the Second Lebanon War.

For most, it has become history. Just another date or chapter in a textbook. It could even be a summer which has blurred into all the others.

However, for some, war is not entirely left in the past. And today, that feels more relevant than ever. While we mark 20 years since one war, we are still living through the consequences of another.

The trauma of October 7 and the war that followed is still raw, immediate, and unfolding. Soldiers and civilians are only now beginning to understand what they experienced and how it has affected them. There has not yet been enough time for memories to blur, or for their trauma to be considered “post”.  Maybe that’s what we fail to understand when we speak about wars in the past tense.

Fighting may stop. Soldiers may come home. Dates become anniversaries. But for those who carry trauma, the war can continue in ways that are invisible to everyone else.

Twenty years from now, there will be people looking back at 2026 in the same way we look back at 2006. Memories of these years may become softened by time, and there will be many who’ll remember exactly where they were and what they saw and heard.

As we mark 20 years since the Second Lebanon War, the question is not simply how much time has passed. Rather, when is a war truly over?  When the white flag is waved? When the last soldier leaves the battlefield? When people stop talking about it?

Or perhaps, only when the scars finally begin to heal?