A Collision of Values, Identity, and Existential Threat Moral Injury: A Wound to Meaning, Not Just Memory Moral injury is not fear-based trauma. It is value-based trauma. It occurs when an individual: Perpetrates, witnesses, or is unable to prevent actions that violate deeply held moral beliefs Or is betrayed by authority, leadership, or institutions they trusted to uphold those values For service members, moral injury often emerges from: Orders that conflict with conscience

Below is a clinical–narrative exploration of the grief experienced by a service member whose career ends prematurely through a dishonourable discharge, particularly when the departure is unwanted, contested, or perceived as unjust. This framing treats the event not as a single loss, but as a cascade of deaths—identity, meaning, belonging, future-self—occurring simultaneously. The Death of a Chosen Identity For many service members, the role is not a job—it is a chosen self. S

The Core of Veteran Grief: Loss Without a Funeral Veteran grief is often disenfranchised grief—loss that is not publicly recognized or socially validated. Veterans grieve: The person they were before service The future they imagined for themselves The body that once worked without pain or limitation The moral clarity they may have once held The comrades who understood them in ways civilians cannot This grief is rarely named as grief. Instead, it is mislabeled as anger, withdr

Trigger warning — this message discusses suicide and its aftermath. If anything I say brings up immediate danger for you or someone else, please call your local emergency number now or a crisis line (in the U.S. or Canada, dial 988). When a service member dies by suicide, the shock is physical — a unit that shared food, watch, jokes, and missions now has an absence that feels like a hole in the formation. The loss lands differently than other deaths. It carries operational, p

A narrative exploration of grief as it is lived by those in active service—and by the families who love them—without relying on stage-based models. This grief is not an event. It is a climate. It settles into daily life and reshapes it. The Grief of Active Service There is a quiet grief that begins long before anything is lost. It begins the first time duty is chosen over dinner, over bedtime, over a promised weekend. It is not a dramatic decision. It rarely feels like a choi