Okay. Afterall.

I watched a woman hand a flag to a man today.

Rows of blue standing silent and still in the morning sun, beads of sweat the only evidence of strain among the rank and file. The plaintive wail of the pipes disappearing into the air, tartan and flags snapped lightly. The crack of rifles thrice over. White gloved hands rising and falling in slow salute. Pain diluted and sharpened, the sound of silence washing over us in awkward waves of comfort.

And in the silence, her whisper thundered “Are you okay?” in my head as she walked me past a line of blue.

Am I? Am I okay?

In a few short months it will have been four years since she whispered to me, officer to grieving spouse, stranger to stranger, woman to woman. Four years since the rifles fired for him and my fingers welcomed the flag that was the last gift. Four years since a little boy asked why “that man was saying things about Daddy that made you cry” and a little girl screamed at the injustice of it all.

Four years of loss and renewal. Questions and answers. Resistance to change and rushing toward it. Memories not yet made, lost. Sleepless nights and comfortable slumber. Tears and laughter. Anger and adjustment. Four years after a moment that changed everything. They are the lost and found years.

A life lost and a new life found.

In four years we have processed trauma mentally and physically debilitating. We have embraced new friendships and watched others languish. We have found new passions and embraced new experiences. We’ve questioned the expected and chased the unexpected. We have challenged norms and demanded more.

The pipes still tear at my heart. The crack of rifles continues to pierce my soul. The line of blue remains uncomfortably comforting.

 

Because we’re more than okay.

The Kindness of Strangers.

She is a stranger, and yet I know that we would talk for hours. Like old friends, we would laugh at memories and strike with whispered lashings at the vultures circling. And as the months passed and our minds cleared, we would wander unguided through the place were widows are left to wither and decay.  

But it is not about me. And it is not about her.

Her pain is no worse, and no less, than mine. Like those of us who have passed before—and those yet to pass—it is simply hers. My tears run hot for a little girl who does not remember the laughter and the warmth. Hers burn viciously for a little girl who will never be held at all. She mourns dreams never realized. I pick up the pieces of a life half lived. She is just beginning. I am beginning to live.  

Like parched leaves that swirl and rest and swirl again, I piece together the moments and the hours. Time that stood still before vanishing into the silent movie that replays in my memory. Help offered and unexpected kindnesses given. Cards filled with handwritten words awash in dried teardrops. Questions without answers. Blue shirts. Black boots. Polished brass.

A cream envelope.

He knew my husband by profession first. By mutual friendships, characteristics and moral compass second. While I mourned a husband taken without warning, she mourned a husband slipping away. And together they looked beyond their own pain to mine, giving me the gift of hope, compassion and peace of mind asking nothing in return and yet deserving so much more than I could give. Until I wrote the letters of her name on an envelope, like they had written mine only a few months earlier.

It is often said that those who receive the least, give back the most. Like the envelope that was filled with so much more than it held.

I do not know the woman behind the name on the creamy envelope in front of me. I write the letters of her name slowly, as though with each letter the pipes that played for her became less melancholy and more hopeful. And I wonder if someday she will wonder about the woman behind another name.

On another cream envelope.

Little Black Dress.

Ever since Coco dared to thumb her nose at pastels and Audrey stepped out for a monochromatic breakfast, a woman without the perfect LBD is like … well … a 40-ish man without a sports car.

It’s like having a midlife crisis and being trapped in your closet. At the same time.

Each time I’ve needed a little black dress life grinds to a halt at DEFCON 1. I’ve bought, returned, altered, worn and donated at least 50 since achieving adulthood, all in pursuit of finding “the one.” Lace, satin, crepe wool, cotton, jersey, rayon, chiffon. Sheath, shift, A-line, wrap,  v-neck, boat neck, sleeveless, quarter sleeves, capped sleeves, long sleeves. Beaded, sequined, fringed, tiered, slit, simple. Ankle, mid-calf, below the knee, above the knee, well above the knee. I liked something about each one, but never truly loved any of them.

And then my search for the quintessential cocktail dress that showed just enough leg, décolletage and delivered exactly the right body shaping characteristics suddenly became a search for something different.

Little Black Dress? Meet Widow’s Weeds.

In the midst of everything I was suddenly faced with the stark reality that I needed the penultimate little black dress. Something classic yet current. Something befitting the collision of youth, the maturity of motherhood and the wreckage of love interrupted. Surrounded by friends that gently propelled me through the motions of a search I once found irritating and now faced with ambivalence and dread, my fingers moved listlessly through the racks until I found it. Simple, black and loose enough to conceal the increasingly gaunt figure beneath. And like all the rest that came before, I didn’t love it. I despised it.

It hangs quietly in the corner, a relic that I loathe the idea of relinquishing. I’ve worn it since, always in respect and sadness and oddly comforting in its discomfort. Tomorrow I will wear it once again to remember and pay my respects to a man I did not know.

And to honor the woman in the little black dress standing silent and proud before him.

Sharp Corners.

“Mommy, why is he giving you that?”

Their movements are sharp and controlled, almost beautiful in their pained restraint. They lift and snap the cloth, edges perfectly aligned. With each careful turn they draw closer together, their eyes never parting as white-gloved fingers mark the folds. Bold stripes vanish among the stars.

I don’t remember this. I don’t remember the folding of the flag.

I don’t know if I should. I don’t know if it is among the images that have vanished into the fogginess or if I did not see it. I remember the smell, the heaviness of its oddly triangular weight. The timbre of the voice still echoes deep within that place where memories are hidden, but I cannot see the face nor can I hear the words spoken. I cannot see any of the faces from that day. I still hear the shots fired, bullet casings that remain tucked within the folds. I know the precise moment my hand left my son’s knee to receive it and I remember the words we exchanged while the air around us was silent.

“Sweetheart, they are giving us this to remember your Daddy and because he was a wonderful policeman. They are celebrating him for us.”

“But it is making you cry and I don’t want you to cry. I’m going to be just like him when I am bigger.”

“You already are, lovely boy. You are already are.”

There is something final and inescapable about that moment, the weight of the folded flag pulling you further into your despair as the solemnity of ceremony forces an acceptance of the end. There are words of celebration and remembrance, love and bonds that death can never sever, and images and memories that bring laughter to teary eyes. But it is the flag once draped across the coffin and now folded sharply that sharply reminds you. It is all you have left of the body you leave behind that day.

It is the last gift.

Watching them move, a silent ritual both painful and proud, I wonder if it has the same musty smell and if the fingers receiving it feel the coarseness of the threads. I wonder if the ones they kneel respectfully in front of truly hear the words, or if they will become sharply defined images and sounds that linger for weeks and months before being tucked away in the deep recesses of their minds where memories that sting are carefully saved.

I wonder if they will ever look at a flag flying proudly without wondering.  

Chosen for a Reason.

A soldier starting his deployment with Chosen in the spring of 2007 had roughly a one-in-two chance of getting killed or wounded before the end of his tour. 

– “Return to the Valley of Death,” Sebastian Junger for Vanity Fair, October 2008

He was the one who broke his arm, has scars in both eyebrows and split his lower lip wide open. As a teenager he ripped the cartilage of his nose apart and as a young adult managed to shoot himself in the knee. So when my little brother announced he was enlisting, I was sure it was a mistake.

But it wasn’t. And then he was gone. 

He left a boy, awkward and proud. Not sure where he would be sent, we hoped for one and dreaded another. One of Airborne’s Chosen he was dispatched to the worst that Afghanistan could offer, his fractured missives giving us a glimpse into a place and a horror we couldn’t fully grasp. Bella, Ranch House, Wanat. Places we would never see and that he would never forget. He came back wearing battle-weary fatigues and steel wristbands bearing the names of fallen friends. Dates and images engraved in his memory.

We were all besieged in the last months of his deployment, each day dragging into the next. A summer under fire. So close to home and yet so far away, his notes relaying the anxiousness that permeated their days. Waiting to be attacked. To fight. To come home. Hit in the final days of his tour, he stayed to fight alongside a family fused by the bonds of war, refusing to leave until those that remained left as they had arrived – as one.

My husband calmed the storm, assuring me that he would be home soon. And suddenly he was. But instead of a hero’s return, he came quietly in the night traveling halfway around the world to rescue me from my own loss. I watched as my children clung to the spark of light that came with him, his boyish humor still embedded within the man he had become. I felt him watching me, the hardened soldier surveying the battlefield. No longer the protector, I became the one watched over.

He drove me back from the funeral home in the dark, the quiet measure of his voice belying the pain of his experience as he prepared me for the days and the months ahead.

“Is this the same?”

He left a boy, but returned a man. I knew what he had seen, what he had suffered, but I would never truly know what they had all left behind in that place. I needed to know whether the man beside me was the soldier who had lived through hell or the little brother that had been there as I grew to love the man I had lost. Or was he both? After everything he had seen and the fallen friends he had grown up and fought beside, recovered, mourned and vowed never to forget, he turned and looked at me for the first time in that long, lonely car ride.

“No. This is family.”

He left to fight for something far greater than all of us. He came home to fight for me.

The Pipes will Always Call.

A bowl of peanuts wrapped in paper-thin skins reminds me of my grandfather, his swollen knuckles and rough hands a reflection of the hard life he lived. The smell of a pipe is always followed by an echo of the wet cough that ultimately took my other grandfather’s life. Swedish Fish bring back images of summertime and walking with cousins to the corner store for penny candies.

Peanuts, pipes and penny candies.

This week we watched a remarkable young man receive the Eagle Scout distinction from the Boy Scouts of America. A year ago, I knew nothing about scouting except that it was time consuming and therefore I wanted nothing to do with it. Our schedule was already stretched beyond capacity. So, when I was approached to be on the receiving end of an Eagle Scout project, I didn’t realize what it entailed. I now know it means a great deal and the formality of the evening made that clear.

I expected to celebrate a young man’s achievement. I did not expect bagpipes. I was not prepared for bagpipes.

Funerals steeped in formality are breathtaking. Beautiful expressions of sorrow and pride, with rigid formations of uniformed peers honoring one lost from their ranks. The flag folded with precision and presented on bent knee. Shots fired in salute. The cry of the bagpipes.

The melancholy wailing begins in awkward loneliness and swells in celebration and grief, a sound that fills your soul and moves you to want to become something more than you are at that very moment. For a widow, it is something entirely more painful and enduring. Like a stain, it lingers in your memory long after you leave the black dress, wreaths and dress uniforms behind, a constant reminder of what has been lost.

I don’t know why I turned to my son when the bagpipes began. The flash of pain crossed his face and vanished so quickly that it almost wasn’t there, and in that moment I realized that he had heard the pipes only once before. On a day when there was no escaping the depth and finality of our loss. As much as the sound has left an indelible mark on my soul it has left an even deeper one on my children.

I knelt down and whispered as he reached for my hand – “Never forget. Daddy will always live here in your heart.” I pulled him close and covered his racing heart as the pipes swelled inside mine.