Unremarried Widow (21 page)

“What do I do with this?” I said to the woman behind the table.

“You wear it,” she said. “Like this.”

She took the large envelope out of my hand and dug through the contents until she found a small black pouch with a nylon cord.

“The string goes around your neck,” she said, “and your button goes right here.”

She lifted the pouch out of my hands and pinned the button to the side.

“Don't forget your ribbons,” she said.

She pointed to the next table over, where colored ribbons lay in neat rows, each with a printed label:
L
OVED
O
NE
,
S
IBLING
,
P
ARENT
;
M
ARINE
,
N
AVY
,
A
IR
F
ORCE
.
I took a green
A
RMY
ribbon and a purple
S
POUSE
ribbon. As I pulled the strips of paper off their adhesive backs, I noticed a woman in line behind me. She dropped the black cord of her pouch around her neck.

“Who did you lose?” she asked as she reached around me for a
S
POUSE
ribbon.

I was shocked for a moment at the casualness of it, the way this woman I didn't know could ask me about something I rarely discussed. But I reminded myself that I was at the conference to talk about Miles and to meet other grieving survivors. Otherwise, why bother?

“I lost my husband,” I said. “Miles.”

“Can I see?”

The woman pointed to the button hanging on my badge. As I
passed the photo to her I realized how young the man in the image was. It occurred to me that someday I will be an old woman carrying a photo of the boy I love.

“He's cute,” the woman said.

She handed back the button and I smiled despite myself.

“We regret, those of us
who have lost a loved one suddenly, that we didn't have the chance to say good-bye.”

A speaker with soft arms and an expansive bosom, the kind of frame made for hugging, stood at the front of the conference room while I sat at a crowded table in the audience. A woman across from me reached for a box of tissues at the center; it looked like she'd been crying all day.

“We think if we just had one more minute with them, we'd say all the things that didn't get said.” The presenter moved across the floor as she spoke. “Now, this may make some of you sad. And it may make some of you angry. But listen to what I'm going to say. You think if you had another minute, you think if you had more time, you would tell them good-bye. But that's not what you would say. Here's what you would say.
I love you.
And
I'll miss you
. And
Remember that time we—
You'd say all that. But
Good-bye
? Never.”

I scanned the room: everyone had the same look, a mix of devastation and hope.

“Now, this is blank paper,” the speaker said as she handed out white strips. “Don't write anything on it.”

She stopped beside my table and laid a stack in the middle.

“I mean, I want you to write on it. But let me tell you what it's got to say first.”

People laughed the way they will when they're steeling themselves, when they know the hard part's coming.

“We all have unresolved issues with our loved one,” the speaker said. “It's the nature of love. We all have issues that we didn't work out, problems that never got fixed. I want you to think about what that is for you. Go ahead. Take a minute. Close your eyes if you want to.”

I closed mine, weary from looking at all those wrecked faces, and shuffled through what Miles and I had left undone, unsaid.

“Now think of the issue that weighs on you the most,” the speaker said. “What is it you wish you could say to them if you had one last time together? What do you need to apologize for? What do you need to get off your chest?”

I scrolled down the list of things I wished I had done differently. If only I had kept my mouth shut—about the house, about the military, about my worries for the future. If only I had been kinder, gentler. If only I could have brought Miles home.

“Go ahead and open your eyes now,” the speaker said.

The conference room was the same, all brokenhearted parents and sisters and wives. All of us sick with our grief.

“Now, what I want you to do with this scrap of paper”—the speaker held up one of the blank sheets in front of her—“I want you to write down what you would say to your loved one.”

I met the eyes of the young woman next to me and we both raised questioning brows.

“I'm going to take the papers—now, fold them up good when you get done writing—and I'm going to take them home. I'm not going to look at them. I'm going to burn them and they'll go up in smoke, and that way—now, you may believe this and you may not—but I like to think your loved one will get the message.”

The young woman to my side passed me a pen.

“Take a minute now,” the speaker said. “Don't rush yourself. Write what you need to write.”

I thought of the fear that I nursed daily, the fear that I slept with at night and woke to in the morning, the fear I carried like my mother
carried her silence, like Teresa carried her blame. I held the slip of paper and picked up the pen.

I'm afraid I didn't love you enough to save you,
I wrote.

The pain that came with it wrung my lungs and seared my eyes. Around the other tables, men and women were also weeping. I reread what I had written and it occurred to me that perhaps my fear was groundless. In a way that I had previously been unable to see, I realized my love had not factored in his death. There was action and fate and pure dumb luck. There was the absurdity of circumstance, that two good pilots could be brought down by bad weather they had seen coming. There was the reality that sometimes one helicopter goes down and the second does not. There was the unfairness that sometimes your husband is on the one that goes down. Bur my love for Miles? There had been more than enough.

“Just leave your paper on the side table on your way out,” the speaker said from the front of the room.

I folded mine quickly before anyone could see what I had written, and as I filed out of the room I added my small slip to the others stacked on a table against the wall. Much later I tried to describe the experience of the conference to someone—the photo buttons and the seminars and the crying with strangers—and he said, “That sounds awful.” But it wasn't awful. It was difficult and painful and terribly, terribly hard. But it was also redemptive, like a brush fire to clear the land.

For the TAPS Saturday night
banquet, I dressed in a black cotton dress cut low in the front. Too racy for that crowd, I figured, but I wore it anyway. I wondered if there would be dancing. The experience had been so surreal—all that laughter, all that festivity in the midst of overwhelming sadness—that I had ceased being surprised. People milled outside the reception hall in their nice clothes, suddenly strange without their
red T-shirts. A few men circulated, fathers and brothers and friends, but the crowd was mostly women. A pretty blonde stood to my left and smiled when I glanced over. I smiled back.

“Are you here by yourself?” she said. The woman, who looked my age, stuck out a hand. “I'm Laura.” She turned to the small group beside her. “We're all wives. I mean, widows.”

I shook each of their hands—Mindi, Jocelyn, Jaime, Sarah—and we fell into a conversation that surprised me with its instant intimacy.

“How long were you married?” Jaime asked.

“Just four months,” I said. “You?”

“Eight years. I met Dave in high school.”

“What branch was your husband in?” Mindi said.

“Army.”

“I'm Army too. Which unit?”

“The Eighty-Second. Out of Bragg. Yours?”

“The Two-Six Cav out of Hawaii.”

“How did your husbands die?” I asked and was shocked for a moment at my boldness. But they answered without hesitation.

“A Kiowa crash,” Mindi said.

“An IED blast.”

“IED.”

“And yours?” Mindi asked.

“Helicopter crash,” I said.

They nodded, knowing.

“Did you meet before TAPS?” I asked the group.

Laura laughed.

“No, we just met,” she said. “This is our first time here.”

The crowd shuffled slowly into the ballroom and our group of widows claimed a table in the back. Sarah bought a bottle of wine. I bought a second. A keynote speaker talked about honor and sacrifice and a woman sang “Amazing Grace.” Jocelyn, who was only a few weeks in, covered her face with her hands and Sarah wrapped her in her arms. I
looked around the table and saw that we were all crying. For the first time in a long time, it felt all right. We ate the baked chicken and asparagus that the waiters served. We drank our cheap hotel wine. At one point Mindi pulled a rose from the arrangement in the middle of the table and soon we each had a flower stuck in the neckline of our dresses.

“Our ‘bereavage,' ” she called it.

There was no dancing, as it turned out, just a slow end to the evening. I laughed in a way I had not laughed since Miles died. As we headed out of the ballroom and to our separate hotel suites, I wondered why I hadn't known women like them before. Where had they been when I was trying to make a life alongside the military?

The answer, of course, is that they had been there all along.

On the morning of Memorial
Day, TAPS arranged a shuttle from the hotel to Arlington National Cemetery and our small group of widows joined up at Section 60. We followed Mindi to her husband Tuc's grave, in the row in front of John's, and we fanned out around her on the grass. We sat for a time without talking and then, in the way of military widows, we talked about the grim details of our husbands' deaths. This was the new language I had learned to speak, a lexicon of
briefings
and
autopsy reports
and
partial remains.

“You said Tuc died in a helicopter crash?” Sarah asked.

“Yeah,” Mindi said. “They got shot and went down hard.”

“Did you get to see him after he came back?”

“In the funeral home.”

I sat back on the grass. “You saw him?”

“Just from the waist up. In the coffin.”

“How was he?”

“He looked all right.”

“I saw Sean,” Laura said. “As soon as they got him to the funeral home.”

“What was it like?” I said. “To see him, I mean.”

“Not too bad. I got to hold his hand.”

“How was it?”

“He was cold,” Laura said. “They pack them in ice.”

I imagined Miles's body gone stiff and cool, and I shivered. Other families had started to fill the cemetery, and a group of young men smoked cigars a few graves down. They had brought folding chairs and a cooler of beer, as if they planned to be there all day.

“I didn't see Dave,” Jaime said. “The IED blew apart his Humvee. I don't want—”

She looked at her feet and back at us, and we returned her look without flinching.

“I don't want to think about how he came home.”

I ran my hand over the grass and felt the day's heat gathered there. To the east the brown waters of the Potomac churned toward the sea, and I thought of rivers running red with blood. At Arlington the grave markers are white like ivory or teeth or bone. I looked at the young women beside me and considered the terrible knowledge they carry inside them—knowledge I carried too—and I felt a sudden responsibility to tell their stories, our stories. I wanted everyone to know the things we knew.

The 1st Attack Reconnaissance Battalion
of the 82nd Airborne Division came home from Iraq in October 2007, fifteen months after the unit deployed. I refused to let anyone tell me the exact date the soldiers would fly to Fort Bragg. If I had known that the families were reuniting while I sat alone in my rented house with its ragged backyard and half my things in boxes, it would have felt like a betrayal of the gravest kind. I preferred to think that one day the unit would be in Iraq and one day it would be home, with nothing in between. No dramatic welcome reception with flags and balloons and signs, the reunion sweetness I will never know. There are widows who go to the homecoming. They say being there and not seeing their husbands walk off the plane confirms the truth of what happened. They say it brings them closure. I do not believe in closure. But knowing the unit was home felt like an ending of sorts to one story, and I liked to think it created room for the opening of another.

When I first thought about
quitting my job on the farm to write full-time, I e-mailed an editor friend to ask her opinion.

“Are you nuts?” she wrote back.

I laughed. I was.

I took time off and visited Vietnam and Cambodia. The
News-Press
commissioned a travel piece and the editors published my article on the front page of the Sunday travel section, my favorite section, the section I read every morning growing up, where the stories that first inspired my dreams of writing had appeared. I took more time off and visited India; I sold an article on the desert cities of Rajasthan. I pitched a local lifestyles magazine and the editor there gave me an assignment. One of my essays appeared in a literary magazine. On a cool afternoon on the farm, I gathered my nerve, walked into my boss's office, and told him I was quitting. He looked completely unsurprised.

The Sunshine Café had two
recommending qualities: it served breakfast and cocktails all day. The early-bird special was invented for places like that, and by the time our group of hospice widows rolled in after the Tuesday night meeting, most of the diners were finishing their banana pudding. We took our usual table by the window and ordered drinks.