(WAG) It’s probably a remnant of our animal past when being the only survivor of a massacre usually meant you had done the killing, and needed to prepare for the consequences (e.g. running away, building a defense, etc.)
(WAG 2) probably as a byproduct of the “everything happens for a reason” mentality. If there’s a reason I survived and they didn’t, then something I did caused me to survive. If I could save myself, I could have saved them, too.
Sometimes it’s a feeling of “I should have done something differently”, “If I had done/not done A, then Bill would still be alive”, “If I had only seen that”, etc.
I graduated high school in 1968. 'Nam was the first think on everyone’s mind.
I volunteered – not because I was a diehard patriot, but because I couldn’t take being a bystander any longer. I’d had polio when I was young, & it caused me to be very thin & extremely nearsighted.
I thought “body mass index” was something new, but the Armed Forces used it back in '68. At least, they told me that I weighed too little for my height. But the nearsightedness was the real clincher.
Every branch rejected me. It was a “Don’t call us. We’ll call you” situation.
A lot of people in my high school class died in 'Nam. I saw friend after friend get called in as draftees. I watched that draft raffle that made me sick. I’d already volunteered. I think it might’ve been in '67 as well as '68. But I wasn’t physically fit.
This still torments me. It always will. It’s a feeling of helplessness more than anything. And I kept wondering why really healthy people had to go. If I was so unfit, why not send me? I didn’t want to kill anybody. But I wanted to help my own generation. They should’ve used me. I would’ve made a good sniper.
Does anyone else have this problem? Just asking.
My father came very close to talking about this with me once.
(I was born in 1969, he had been teaching at a University since 1964.)
In my teens I discovered a tape of the song 7 O’Clock News/Silent Night by Simon and Garfunkel. If you don’t know it, it is a simple mix of them singing Silent Night and a news report covering a wide range of issues: a dispute in Congress over proposed civil rights legislation, the death by overdose of comedian Lenny Bruce, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s plan to lead a march in Cicero, Illinois, the Grand Jury indictment of serial killer Richard Speck, a disruption of hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee investigating anti-war protests, and finally a speech by Richard Nixon where he called the anti-war movement “greatest single weapon working against the United States”.
I played that song over and over and over, captivated by the juxtaposition of the news (mostly bad stuff) with the sentiment of Silent Night. (This was probably 1984, as I recall Speck was in the news again due to a parole hearing.)
Apparently Dad had been reacting badly to it, though.
When he finally … begged me to stop playing that song, he began to say how I couldn’t appreciate what it had been like, to have students pleading with you to not give them a failing grade, because one more F would flunk them out, and then they’d be eligible for the draft.
And then he just stopped talking.
He had a clubbed foot, and so was medically unfit for service, so he’d never had to face the question of whether to risk getting sent to a war zone. I know that he knew that was a privilege, and that people he’d known went to Korea. Hell, his childhood was during WWII.
I don’t know if he chose to sacrifice his professional integrity by giving someone a grade they didn’t deserve because the alternative meant they might die, or if he only gave out the grades his students earned even if doing so might get them killed. But I know he found it hard to live with the decision he had made, whichever it was.
When I was 19, I was at a pub with my best friend, we accepted a ride with an friend she ran into there. In an Alfa Romeo, he’d been drinking, three people in a two seater car. Traffic on the freeway ahead of us had come to a sudden stop. We did not. There is no engine in the front of an AR, it’s in the rear. I was sitting on my friends lap, being smaller. One second I was squirming about, trying to get more comfortable, my forehead on the tiny windshield, she leaned forward and in front of me a second later when we impacted the standing traffic ahead. Literally a split second.
In the seconds before impact we were joking around about which of us was cuter, the driver opining that while she was truly a beauty he felt that I had a special spark in addition to mere looks. ( I have never before shared this detail with any living person!)
My friend never woke up and was removed from life support three days later. The driver was injured, scarred physically and, no doubt emotionally, and faced penalties. I walked away without a mark on me.
I was sitting on HER lap! A split second!
I have not spoken of these events in many years, but my heart races and I tremble even now as I type this.
Survivors guilt is a very, VERY real thing. And can often send people completely off the rails, crashing their lives and never recovering. Take my word for it. I beg you.
Especially because the memorial services for those that didn’t survive all talk about how wonderful they were, what wonderful things they had accomplished (if old; if young it’s what wonderful potential they were showing), etc. – funeral orations are almost always very sanitized & complimentary.
So this makes the survivor hearing this just feel that much more unworthy, comparing themself to those being memorialized.
Might be an unusual form of loneliness - if you were the lone survivor in a plane crash that killed the other 299 folks, there are no fellow survivors to commiserate with or relate to you.
No, but if 39 people died in a bus crash and you, the 40th, were the lone survivor, you might feel it.
I have it, not really due to surviving some major event or anything, though.
1 of them- My step-father died in a freak accident the day after I told him I wished he would die. Circumstances led to me not being with him when the accident occurred. If I had been, I probably would have died instead. I was abused and I did feel (mutual) hate for him at the time, but I have spent 20+ years deeply depressed and living a lonely life. I think I wish I had died instead. At the same time I feel I may have “saved” my siblings (though I also feel I failed them). A lot of mixed feelings.