Living With What You Didn’t Do

  Lots of men suffer from the things they did in war but for Major Henry Rathbone what drove him to insanity was what he didn’t do.

  Rathbone would spend the last 27 years of his life in an asylum for the criminally insane after attacking and killing his wife Clara as she tried to defend their children from his deranged attack. It wasn’t the stress of his job in the U.S. Consul in Hanover, Germany that drove him over the edge, it was the stares. As Clara put it, “In every hotel we’re in, as soon as people get wind of our presence, we feel ourselves become objects of morbid scrutiny … Whenever we were in the dining room, we began to feel like zoo animals”. Henry imagined the worst when it came to what those people behind the stares were thinking.

  What more could he have done that night?

  He’d almost died in his effort. No one was expecting the attack. The enemy came in a whisper and had succeeded before anyone knew what was going on. Rathbone leaped to the defense immediately only to be severely wounded, much worse than he thought at the moment. He fought the attacker but he knew the ground better than the Major did, it was his home turf after all. So the enemy gets away and now Henry, wounded, sees his commanding officer beside him dying. Henry got him to the medic as fast as he could, his own blood loss almost killing him as he did, yet the commander didn’t make it.

   Did everyone blame Henry for failing to save him? The war was over, they had won, but now it seemed the victory was hollow because of Henry Rathbone's failure to act to protect the most important man in the country.

  In reality, there was more nothing more he could have done that night. He wasn’t on the battlefield, he was in a theater box. He wasn’t there as a protector but a guest. The enemy had worked at that theater for years and could move in and out with ease. He shot the commander as just the right point in the play so no one would be looking. Rathbone and his soon to be bride Clara were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. You see the man beside Major Rathbone was more than just his commander in chief, he was the president of the United States of America Abraham Lincoln.

 Rathbone may have survived his physical injuries that night but he never seemed to escape the events of Ford’s theater. Many people, like Rathbone, suffer years after a tragedy happens, wondering “Why me?” “What more could I have done?” “If only? Regret isn’t just for what we did.

  However, the past is something that can be undone or redone. We can’t change what happened. We can’t fix the event we can only move forward from it. What we did only matter in how it shapes what we do now.

 The past is too heavy of a burden to carry with us as we move forward. Only take the part of it that can be of use to you in the future, and leave the rest behind.

Not that I have already obtained it or have already become perfect, but I press on so that I may lay hold of that for which also I was laid hold of by Christ Jesus.  Brethren, I do not regard myself as having laid hold of it yet; but one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead,

Philippians 3:12-13