Kintsugi Heroes
My father never stopped walking
Jonathon Drane
A son's discovery that his father's unspoken war trauma shaped him too, and how understanding that inheritance became the path to healing it.
Kintsugi Studio
Kintsugi Heroes
Jonathon Drane
A son's discovery that his father's unspoken war trauma shaped him too, and how understanding that inheritance became the path to healing it.
You don't have to be in crisis to call.
Jonathon Drane spent decades not understanding why certain traits ran through his family like an inheritance he never asked for. Claustrophobia. Asthma. Obsessive patterns that woke him at night, moving things on his bedside table until his father yelled at him to stop. It wasn't until he watched a 60 Minutes report about OCD that Jonathon recognised what he'd been doing as a child. That recognition led him to look harder at his father's story: six years of war across North Africa, New Guinea, and Borneo. Sending his mate Jack to Kokoda, watching Jack die, carrying that moral injury in silence for decades.
When Jonathon finally asked his father at 90 what therapy he'd had, the answer changed everything. His father said he never stopped walking after Jack died. He said his therapy was having a family. Part of Jonathon was angry at first. But as time went on, he understood: his father had found a way to carry his wounds and still show up for his children. He showed them pathways into curiosity, chemistry sets at the laundry sink, the question mark that keeps a mind alive.
Jonathon's research now explores what happens when soldiers leave service without a real way back to being citizens. The military breaks a civilian and remakes them into a soldier. But when they leave, there is no equivalent process to switch them back on as people. They get stuck in limbo, carrying both the old life they can never return to and the soldier identity they cannot shed. Understanding this inheritance, Jonathon learned, is the first step to building something different for the next generation. Reflection and curiosity, not silence, offer the way through.
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