A Warrior Only Dies Once

 

I was eleven when I saw this cover the first time. And I knew. Immediately. Yes, absolutely immediately. That this book was important. It’s that moment when time stops and you realize you will be holding this book decades from now, and that I would never really let it go.

Well, I found that copy at my in-laws, 23 years later. I took it home. Funny how that works. I remember it being my favorite of the Redwall books (with Lord Brocktree a close second), and I think it's because of the following quote:

"A coward dies a thousand times, but a warrior dies only once."

At the time I had no idea the things that would come at me. I didn't know that life, which had already been filled with rapes, beatings, and manipulations, was about to get much harder. I did not know that I would have to figure out what all the evil I experienced meant to me, an act that would change me in ways that I am still trying to get ahold of, decades later. So was it providence that I ran acrost this quote one year before the questions about whether or not life was worth living in the wake of all that had happened? Before the battle became interior? I mean, I suppose? It certainly seems that way. All I knew was that my eleven year old self read that book and felt something very deep, primal, powerful, that I've not felt from anything else: dive in head first, giving up is far worse than dying.

And then over the next twenty years I more or less consciously forgot it. Thanks to the incredible amount of trauma I'd taken in, I couldn't (and still have a hard time) distinguish what was a threat and what wasn't, meaning that most of my day is spent wasting my energy on battles that didn't exist. Which meant that when the time came to actually face down the baggage I'd accumulated I'd be worn out... and fold before it, doing things that I didn't think myself capable of. And that was a death of cowardice. That's what the quote was referring to: giving up who you are because you are afraid. I have died many times.

But, holding that book, I realized that I had more or less forgotten what I had promised myself so long ago: failure was far scarier than dying.

Yeah, easier said than that. But I have to try again. I may not have died once, but I will not die again.

Oh, who'm I kidding? I’ll fail that. But failure was never an option. Forgiveness and trying again is. Nevertheless, one must aim for the impossible, even as one fails it.