We Remember

2012-01-23T06:25:00.000-08:00

Chinese New Year--the Yahoo logo is a rabbit being chased by a dragon which looks a bit like a caterpillar with human legs and feet. Thomas was part of a Chinese dragon his senior year of high school--the only blond, blue-eyed participant. Of course, in costume you could only see the jeans and sneakers that every one of the kids was wearing. They danced and ran around the auditorium of Springbrook High School as part of a multi-cultural festival which was a nice event as I remember. But in addition I remember that Thomas's friends in general were a multi-cultural lot. Springbrook had kids from all over the world and Thomas was happy to be a friend to all of them. It's a little ironic that the only foreign countries that I know that he got to were Canada and Iraq (I assume they stopped somewhere on the way to Iraq but he never said and I've never asked the friends who were with him) when he'd spent five years studying Spanish for his IB diploma and a few weeks on Arabic in the Army. He had cultivated an interest in going to Italy by way of a church group he belonged to called Communion and Liberation (despite the name, a very orthodox Catholic group that began in Italy). They had even gotten him to the point where he would eat pasta which he'd never liked before. A weirdly picky eater for someone who loved junk food as much as he did.

2011-12-24T18:52:00.000-08:00

It is Christmas Eve. If I hear "I'll Be Home for Christmas" one more time, I shall probably throw something. On the other hand, I've gone from wanting to break into sobs when I hear it to just plain numbness--endless repetition apparently can blunt any emotion after a while. It has felt like I've heard it a lot every December since Thomas was killed (yes, let's rub some salt into that open wound why don't we?) and this year has been even worse, I assume because people are noting the U.S.'s departure from Iraq and the return home of many soldiers. Which is the other difficult thing: well-meaning news organizations keep showing us pictures and video of soldiers surprising their loved ones at school or work or at some random event, coming home a little earlier than expected maybe, unannounced. We won't be getting that fairy tale ending here, and yeah, sometimes I feel overwhelmed by the unfairness of it all. But I am glad that these other people are home safely or at least with the prospect of healing and it is definitely my intention to support them in the years to come. I just need to take a deep breath every once in a while.

Yesterday, Richard and I went out to the cemetery to put flowers on the grave. It was a beautiful sunny day, somewhere in the 50s. The first thing we realized was that a fire fighter's funeral was taking place a couple of hundred yards from Thomas's grave site--a color guard in uniform was waiting on one side, and a firetruck was parked nearby. I haven't heard anything on the news recently so I assume that this was a death in the natural course of events, but this was well-attended anyway. When we got to Thomas's grave, we saw that someone had been there recently and left artificial flowers, nice ones, on both his grave and my brother-in-law Eugene's. The nice thing for us was that this meant the vases had been left upright over night and the heavy rain had filled them with water. We had been a little concerned about the faucets having been turned off for the winter (except the deer probably ate all of our flowers within a few hours anyway). As we were arranging the flowers in the vases, we suddenly heard "Taps." We stopped and turned to pay our respects. I asked Richard if this was good timing or bad timing for us: he thought, on the whole, good. The last time we heard "Taps" in that cemetery was the day we buried Thomas.

No pictures this time: I forgot my cell phone and Richard's was almost out of charge. This will still be a good memory.

Thanksgiving, 2010

2011-11-24T19:42:00.001-08:00

Another Thanksgiving. I realized this morning that it's been ten years since we actually celebrated Thanksgiving with Thomas. He was a senior in high school in 2001 so he was home, he was in basic training at Ft.Benning in 2002 (where he told us the officers served the meal), in 2003 he was at Ft.Lewis and may have gone to my sister's for the day, and then he died exactly two weeks before Thanksgiving in 2004. I cannot remember our last Thanksgiving together. What did we do?

Today started as kind of a melancholy day for me. I just missed Thomas (who could eat massive amounts of food) and for whatever reason, the very sunny skies just made it worse. He should have been here enjoying this beautiful day and holding us together. Because that is the difficult part to explain to people: it's not just that he is gone, but that the family we were is gone too. The dynamic is different, the push and pull between siblings and parents feels distorted. We are adjusting but it has been very hard. We've been clawing our way to that new normal I read about occasionally, but it is very hard work and progress is not always as steady as you think it should be.

But we are all here seven years later and I think we are going to be OK.

Seventh Anniversary 11-11-11

2011-11-10T16:53:00.001-08:00

Tomorrow is the seventh anniversary of Thomas's death in Iraq. It is unfortunate that questions arose in the press yesterday and today about the handling of remains at Dover AFB from 2003 to 2008. I believe that Thomas's body was mostly intact but now there has to be a little question mark in my mind. I am mostly upset for the families whose loved ones were most at risk for this mistreatment.

We will have a quiet day tomorrow: Mass at 8:30, a visit to the cemetery, lunch with friends who are in town. Maybe pizza for dinner because Thomas was a pizza kind of guy. We could go to the Chinese restaurant that he and his friends frequented after their poker games, but our last experience there (Christmas of 2004) was not happy and it wasn't just the circumstances. I am disinclined to give it a second chance.

Sadly, an online friend lost her daughter yesterday which I found out this morning. Her daughter was in college, her cause of death unknown to me at this time, but it was sudden and unexpected. Some days it just seems like there is more sorrow than the world can safely hold.

Weather and Waiting

2011-10-29T04:48:00.000-07:00

Much is being made of the withdrawal of troops from Iraq by the end of the year. It's hard to know what this means--the immediate reason (or excuse) for this withdrawal seems to be the Iraqi government's refusal to grant immunity to American troops--but this withdrawal was scheduled anyway, as far back as the Bush administration. I'm of two minds about it, and apparently so are the rest of the concerned parties. Will Iraq be better off with us or without us? Will Iraq be worse off with us or without us? I guess we're going to find out. I just don't want to feel that Thomas's death, and the deaths of all those other servicemembers, was just for nothing, that it made no difference to the well-being of the Iraqi people. My husband points out that Thomas died defending his friends which may ultimately be why all soldiers die but it would be nice to think that the original purpose had been served as well.

And I guess my feelings about all this are complicated by the approach of the seventh anniversary. Daylight is shortening now and the shadows are changing, getting longer. The changing of the light always affects me. Today we are having a cold, grey rain (or possibly snow later on) which may, perversely, cheer me up. It's the sunlight that I find oppressive now. Someday I hope I'll be able to experience the autumn without reliving the anxiety I felt all that October and early November, waiting for Thomas to leave for Iraq, and then waiting to hear from him. And then, nothing.

2011-10-11T19:28:00.000-07:00

It is October 11, 2011. Thomas's seventh anniversary will be 11/11/11. Today it is 83 months since the day he died. I don't think much about the 11th of the month any more--sometimes it passes and I realize the next day that I missed it--but I think it lurks in the back of my mind anyway.

2011-09-11T19:24:00.000-07:00

I've been sewing today. It is September 11, 2011 and ten years ago today, the course of history seemed to take a sharp turn, pulling all of us into a different place. For a moment, I'd like to talk about why sewing and 9/11 are linked in my mind.

On September 9 of 2001, my friend Debbie and I went to the first session of a quilting class given by a prominent local quilter named Donna Radnor. The class was based on a pattern that Donna had developed called "Fractured Log Cabin." I had totally misunderstood the way I was supposed to prepare for the class, brought fabrics and scraps that were not going to work in the pattern and ended up feeling a little desperate. However, not all was lost: I had a couple of things that would work and Debbie had a few things that went with my fabrics and I got started.

Two days later, the towers were struck, the Pentagon was hit, a field in Pennsylvania was destroyed. We, the entire United States, went into shock. And I set aside my quilt. One of the things I have learned over the years is that you sew your emotions into your quilts. I knew that if I worked on this quilt while the shock was fresh, I would never want to touch it or look at it again. So, I waited. The class was taught in two sessions, two weeks apart. I waited until the second session on September 23rd to buy the rest of my fabrics and decide where I wanted to take that quilt.

In January of 2002, Debbie and I went to New York City to visit the World Trade Center site. It was cold and snowy. Pay phones in lower Manhattan still did not work. Debbie and I ate lunch and then went to visit The City Quilter, a fabric shop where I bought fabric to back my quilt. At the end of our day, we went Ground Zero. The site was active, but the smoke and dust were long gone. The makeshift memorials still lingered, lining the sidewalks. It was quiet and solemn and empty, those buildings just gone.

I finished my Fractured Log Cabin quilt a few months after that. I am glad that a large piece of that quilt came from New York City. It is probably one of the best things I've ever made. Debbie, who continued working on hers through the crisis, never finished.

This week I've been listening to the radio as survivors have told their stories. I've cried a little. I've remembered Thomas. And I have kept on sewing. This evening I realized that I have put some of my grief into this new quilt, but also I have sewn in hope.

2011-09-09T18:41:00.000-07:00

http://colesville.patch.com/articles/remembering-911-thomas-doerflinger

The story is up. I like it a lot. My Facebook friends seem to like it too.

I miss Thomas.

2011-09-02T14:20:00.000-07:00

Here we are, almost two months later! Yes, it's been action-packed or not, depending on your point of view.

July. After much discussion and a long period of contemplation, we finally decided that it was time to put my mother-in-law into hospice care. She gets to remain home, but we are not treating her heart disease any further (the last time she went to the hospital, they didn't do anything anyway), just making her comfortable. We get visits from a nurse, a social worker and a chaplain who all make sure that everything is working the way it is supposed to. It is very odd and disquieting knowing that what we are preparing for here is a death, hopefully a peaceful death. The final straw came when I took her to her pulmonologist and even his testing set off an episode of short breath. He is a critical care specialist too, he knew what he was seeing. I hugged him goodbye and went home sure that we were making the right decision.

Carrying out that decision though is another matter. We are doing our best and mostly keeping things comfortable but this is very hard. Unless I want to start another blog, I won't be writing more about this, but it is difficult.

At the end of July, I went back to Washington state. I spent a week with friends and family and had a nice time. I did get to Fort Lewis and saw the Stryker Brigade memorial park, and the memorial with Thomas's name, in person. It is tucked away on post, but Anne and I did find it eventually (not sure we would have if it weren't for the fact that she had been assigned there in her youth). The park is small but peaceful and well laid out. The memorial stone had items, just the way that other memorials do--a lawn chair, a couple of canes painted like candy canes, and some little Christmas trees. I will try to post a picture with myself and these items.

And then back to Maryland and the reality of taking care of an elderly woman.

I have been watching (online and mostly on Facebook) a lot of non-profits who help soldiers, Wounded Warriors, families . . . all sorts of things. A lot of people are stepping up. I am still going to the Veterans Collaborative meetings and adding my $.02 from time to time. I did a telephone interview with the Colesville Patch last week with a picture to run as part of their observance of September 11th. Of course, in the meantime we've had a 5.8 earthquake and a brush with Hurricane Irene so I'm not sure I'll make it online after all. It's OK. Other moms have things to say too and they will get asked as well.

But in the meantime, I will admit that I am tired. I'll try to keep up with this a little better, because things have been happening after all (no soldiers were killed in Iraq in the month of August, the first time that has happened since March of 2003 I believe). I want to keep writing.

2011-07-06T10:25:00.001-07:00

Thomas would have been 27 today. I can't imagine what he would have been like as an adult man, making his way in the world after the Army--not for lack of imagination but because that is just too sad, not a place I want to go. Still, I read about his Army friends' lives on Facebook and I am glad that they are doing pretty well: raising families, going to school, working or, in one case, finishing up his time until retirement.

I did say we would buy a cake, but my husband seems to feel that it would be a bit morbid this year. I don't know. Thomas was not afraid of some pretty morbid humor--I think he'd be OK with it. Of course, he's not the one who would be eating the cake. I just wish he could be here while we frantically search for the 2 and 7 candles (we use numerals instead of little individual candles on all our cakes, recycling them or replacing them for every birthday--the "1"got a little short in the course of all the teenage birthdays).

On the other hand, I am happy to have found on Facebook, by way of Michael Yon's posts, a group called "wear blue: run to remember" which meets every Saturday near Fort Lewis (I know, I know, it's Joint Base Lewis-McChord now but it will always be Fort Lewis to me). I need to send for a shirt but other stuff keeps interfering. I just love the idea of running in memory of our fallen, something I did the year after Thomas was killed.

We went to the cemetery on July 4th and left a flag and some flowers. Unfortunately, it was very hot, very humid, and infested with gnats. We pretty much put the flowers in the vase and left. I'm not keen on getting my protein on the wing.

I will post a picture here (and maybe on facebook too) of the memorial plaque at Fort Lewis that I borrowed from someone else. We remember.

Edited later to add: We did end up buying an ice cream cake! No candles, but an awful lot of chocolate:

2011-06-20T03:45:00.000-07:00

We've been talking a little more about Thomas lately. I think this has to do with his upcoming birthday--talk of all of our July birthdays just naturally rises to the surface at this time of year (we have Anna, Thomas, my nephew Mike, my cousin Molly, and the dog Kolbe. We also have Matthew in late June and Molly's son Miles a bit earlier in the month. I expect we will have a cake for Thomas again, in addition to everyone else's cakes.

After the difficulty of getting through Memorial Day, I'm finding this time a bit less fraught. I read about other families and sympathize but my own grief seems to be mostly in abeyance for now. I expect as years go by that I will find this more and more true. I've said that I almost miss the intensity of those first few months, but I know that I couldn't live like that for long. On the other hand, I really do not want to detach completely, not that I think that is likely.

So, we are moving on (not away from Thomas, just in life). Last weekend, I noticed a Wounded Warrior in a wheelchair having trouble getting through downtown Silver Spring (steps instead of ramps) and decided this needed to be pointed out to the powers that be. I've sent off an e-mail--we'll see what happens.

So, for the moment, just hanging in there.

2011-05-30T05:41:00.000-07:00

It is Memorial Day. I'm sitting here watching the Today Show which I almost never do because Nicki Bunting had posted on Facebook about a story they would be showing. Indeed, it was a very nice piece on The American Widow Project--if you are reading this today, May 30, 2011, before 8 a.m. your time, tune in! There have been other wonderful Memorial Day stories too.

The rest of this Memorial Day will be taken with going to Mass this morning at 10 at the cemetery where Thomas is buried, and then this afternoon having a barbeque with family and friends. Memorial Day started as Decoration Day: families would picnic among the gravestones on Day, having decorated the graves of the soldiers. No sales for us today, though Thomas was a big believer in retail therapy. A lot of my Facebook friends have been a bit cranky about all of the sales this weekend and the emphasis on food, but I think it's OK. I've also seen a lot of acknowledgement of what this weekend is really about in the midst of the sales and picnics.

So, no, it is not a happy Memorial Day, but it can be a good one, remembering our beloved fallen, and celebrating their lives.

2011-05-26T13:30:00.000-07:00

It will be Memorial Day this weekend. It's going to be hot. I would like to go to the outdoor Mass at Gate of Heaven but we will not be able to take Richard's mom this year--she's just gotten too frail. We will have a barbeque in the afternoon, mostly in air-conditioned comfort I am sure!

I took Kolbe the Golden Retriever for his walk around noon today and saw a car parked outside the entrance to the park with Iraq and Afghanistan stickers (and a service branch sticker I couldn't see). Entering the park, I could see a woman wearing Army shorts and t-shirt walking her dog up the hill and realized I knew them (slightly)--Nugget the dog and Kolbe have bonded in the past. I asked Nugget's owner if the car was hers which indeed it was. And then I told her about Thomas. Sometimes that's kind of a heavy burden to lay on someone, but she seemed able to deal with it. We talked about his service, about where he'd been and what he was doing when killed, about how it must have been instantaneous really.

Nugget's owner (we never did exchange our own names, just the dogs' and Thomas's) is on her way to retirement. Thank you for your service, and thank you to all of the servicemembers, past and present who read this.

2011-05-05T17:45:00.000-07:00

Louise Penny has asked me to write another blog entry--I am happy to do it because, selfishly, I know I'll get a much bigger audience than I will anywhere else! It is at www.louisepenny.blogspot.com on May 5, 2011 and it is a reflection on how I feel about Osama bin Laden's violent death.

2011-04-05T06:28:00.000-07:00

This is a picture of a blooming peace lily. It normally sits on the counter, right next to this laptop, but I thought the dining room table would be more aesthetically pleasing for a picture. What is so special about this plant? It is the last of the living plants that we received the week after Thomas died. We got a number of them, but the rest have all gone. This one looks to be immortal. One of the other November 2004 moms also got a lot of plants--several years ago we compared survival rates (neither of us having a good record)--I must ask her whether she has any left too. This is the first time I remember seeing this thing bloom since we got it and I have no idea why it did this time. In honor of the effort though, I dusted off its leaves for the first time in . . . a while. Maybe this is a metaphor for hope, springing up unexpectedly from a not very promising source.

Hmmm. PS: The prints in the background are from a Native American artist named April White. Look her up!

2011-04-01T18:26:00.000-07:00

I'm beginning to think that there is another low point in grief sometime after the sixth year. The six-week low seems pretty well documented and understood but people seem to stop talking about grief some time after the first year or so. But I gotta tell you, the last few months have been kind of rough. It's odd to me that I've had those moments of bursting into tears when alone--they had pretty much faded away a couple of years ago, but they seem to be reviving. It is true that I am also dealing with my mother-in-law's illnesses and hospitalizations and it does seem clear that she is nearing the end of her life but things about Thomas come up too. A couple of Deuce Four guys have friended me on Facebook recently. Another has died this week, not someone I'd met. It just seems like there's more than enough sorrow to go around recently.

2011-03-21T10:23:00.001-07:00

I have a stupid confession to make about clothing. Remember the LA Times article in which I had watched one of the hoarding shows and realized that I needed to figure out that Thomas's closet needed to be dealt with? My husband and I did go to that corner of the basement and opened up the portable closet, going through the jackets and T-shirts that Thomas had left in there. One or two made their way upstairs to Matthew's closet. I think we gave away a bag. And then there were the T-shirts. I keep thinking that I will make a T-shirt quilt out of the vast collection that included school, Army and church events Thomas had been part of so I made a disheveled stack of those and left them on top of the closet. Inside were still some jackets. Friday we went back and looked again, thinking this basement needs to be cleared out. Richard handed me the stack of shirts which, this is hard to describe, had enough body to them to hug. I stood there weeping for a moment over these shirts because I could put my arms around them and I can't put my arms around Thomas. Ultimately the stack made it all the way to my sewing room, in a bag, along with a tie that has owls all over it, courtesy of the Nature Conservancy (a premium of some sort obviously. I think we still have the umbrella with the incredibly homely baby osprey as well). The jackets are mostly pretty nice but the problem is that Thomas was a lot thinner than his dad and narrower than his little brother has grown up to be. Most of the jackets are mediums which won't go over Matthew's shoulders (we'll leave out the problems Richard would have . . .). So now I have to figure out a destination for those.

And my own stuff. In my closet I have two sweaters: a red cashmere hoodie I was wearing the day I said goodbye to Thomas, and the navy blue cardigan I was wearing when they came to tell me he was gone. I did wear both of them afterwards, but the red sweater has holes now and I just got tired of the navy blue. Nonetheless, they will stay in my possession, probably forever.

2011-03-06T15:24:00.001-08:00

I decided I needed a new look. It's kind of a radical change from my the old blog look and I'm not sure the pictures made it through (I can't remember which posts had pictures at the moment). Also seem to have lost the sitemeter which may or may not be a good thing. It's not as if I ever had a huge number of people reading--mostly it was to see who was still reading and whether putting some mention of my blog somewhere would boost readership. I'll see how this goes.

It's been a long couple of months--my mother-in-law just finished her third stint in the hospital and is now in rehab. I'm tired. It's not quite as emotionally trying as Thomas's death, but it has some relationship to it.

****
I just spent an hour listening to people talking about sacrifice in relation to the Global War on Terror on the Diane Rehm show. I'm sorry--that was about the most sanitized discussion that I've heard on this war, and the comments posted online varied from hostile (to the war and servicemembers) to incoherent. The panelists did not really get to say much of substance, I think because there were too many of them for anyone to be able to get into his or her subject in depth so there was a kind of glancing reference to a lot of issues. I don't think much of anyone has a clue about how the Gold Star families are coping or not coping. Most people do not seem to realize that as parents we don't get any further privileges (since Thomas was not married, we did get his life insurance money and any other assets he left behind)--we don't get to use commissaries or enter bases without inspection, though the inspection may change in part for the Army families. Initially, we had no support from the armed services beyond our casualty assistance officer, who was only legally with us for 90 days (she did stick with us much longer). Survivor Outreach services exist now, but we have not spoken directly with them despite a couple of phone messages left on our voicemail (and yes, I tried calling back). A few nonprofit organizations like TAPS support families in grief, but it does seem like the nation might be interested as well . . .

This may all sound bitter and angry but really I am not. A lot of other people are. It really is time to start looking very carefully at the fallout from these conflicts.

2011-02-22T18:47:00.000-08:00

Hey, I'm up to four followers! I really hope they are patient people, considering how bad I've been about keeping up with this. The truth is, Facebook and the Delphi forums I go to are easy to post to quickly and briefly, so I end up doing that. People who want to friend me on Facebook can find me as Lee Ann Prewitt Doerflinger, not that I talk about these issues all the time but I do from time to time. Mostly though I end up friending organizations aiding veterans or memorial groups.

Part of the reason for the big gap from last time is the same as the reason for the previous big gap. My mother-in-law was back in the hospital earlier this month, this time with what was probably a minor heart attack, or maybe just congestive heart failure. All of the original problem, with the addition of shingles, was also still there. We understand where this is going, but it's hard. Today, we had a physical therapist come to the house--this was Linda's second visit--and I could hear Edith telling her about Thomas. Thomas wrote a little essay when he was in fourth grade, naming his grandmother as his hero, and Anna typed it up for her grandma so she could frame it and put it up on her wall. Edith talked about Thomas having died at 20, and about the pictures in her room . . . it was sweet. And sad.

One story I put on Facebook recently was about a trip to downtown Silver Spring for dinner. Richard and I were on our way out of Romano's one evening when a young man in a wheelchair, without legs, held the door open for me. On the back of his chair was a patch with "Purple Heart, Marine" on it (I think there was more on it but I just couldn't look any longer). This boy looked very good--his face had color, he was with friends, he was engaged and active--but I still cried after I got out the door.

2011-01-14T17:48:00.000-08:00

Thank you to the readers who responded to my whinge about being a lazy blogger! I intend to keep on, but I just find it so hard to write in between the responsibilities that have fallen to me. My 85 year old mother-in-law, Thomas's paternal grandmother, lives with us and is in failing health. My job is to get her to the doctor(s) in an effort to alleviate her discomfort and maybe even cure the underlying problems. She came under our responsibility a few months after Thomas was killed and her presence has reminded me almost daily that we have a responsibility to the living in addition to our need to honor the fallen. She spent most of the last week in the hospital, and the thought of lugging my laptop to her fifth floor room, even for the free wifi, was just more than I could bear. She's home for now.

I have been really aware of being a Gold Star mother recently. A friend, who started as an online friend and who I met in the flesh about a year after Thomas died, lost her infant daughter on January 5th. Baby Gianna had a prenatal diagnosis of Trisomy 18 which is inevitably lethal: for two months her mother carried her knowing that her daughter might be stillborn or live only a few hours. Gianna lived for two weeks after her birth and then passed away peacefully, at home, with her family. It was a very brave thing they did, and I am in awe of them.

When young people die, whether they are two weeks, nine years or twenty as Thomas was, we often focus on the time they lost, the potential that would not be fulfilled. But I have come to feel more and more strongly that we need to understand that they time they did have was important. It may have been short, but it had impact far beyond our imaginations. Gianna's CaringBridge site has had over 23,000 visits as of this evening and many who have read it have been deeply affected by her spirit which allowed her to live two weeks and by the actions of her parents and family which exemplified unselfish love. A nine-year old girl in Arizona was killed when a madman opened fire on a crowd of constituents meeting their Representative: by all accounts, Christina Taylor Green was out to change her world for the better. I think she has. And Thomas and all the young men and women who have given their lives in this effort to protect us all from terrorism: who would say that their lives were meaningless?

We hate to see young lives cut short and rightly so, but we need to remember that those lives were more than unfulfilled potential: they had meaning too.

2010-12-26T12:14:00.000-08:00

We survived Christmas, though I still have not been to the cemetery. Now it's snowing and blowing, and even though the flakes are light, this does not look like good weather to be visiting a grave site. We will have to wait a day or so.

I'm actually on this site because I finally managed to forget my password and had to reset it. Then I looked this morning at my browser history and wondered if I could remember the new one! Clearly I could. Thomas was not a fan of the internet until he discovered Starcraft (a game, I think I've remembered the name correctly) at which point he became a bit addicted. He never did e-mail us frequently, but he did correspond with his friends pretty often.

I am at best a desultory blogger, and lately I've wondered if I've run out of things to say. New stuff keeps coming up though and I know I'll want to talk about it. But to my loyal readership (I have three followers!), Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

2010-12-23T19:16:00.000-08:00

Christmas is fast approaching. Mostly I would say that holidays haven't bothered me much (you see how I feel about Thanksgiving) but this year seems harder. Maybe because this year we have Leah and I know that Thomas would have loved her, or maybe it's just the accumulation of surrounding events. I'd just like him to be here with us.

I had lunch today with one of my Gold Star mothers (these are my people now). It was good to meet and talk and eat and then I just ended up crying a little. We've met for lunch several times over the last few years (we always think we'll be able to do this more often but life comes up) and I always end up crying. Just for a moment--then the storm passes and I'm OK. If there had been more time today after lunch, I would have gone to the cemetery to see the place where Thomas lies and maybe more important to see the place his friends visit. Hopefully I will be able to carve out some time tomorrow to take flowers or at least leave one of the flags that I buy whenever I find them.

When I came downstairs this evening to write this, the lights in the display cabinet were on--they just seem to come on spontaneously sometimes (judging by other events, I think it's related to fluctuations in the power supply). I need to pick up the stuff that we lent to the library--the lights reminded me that his picture is missing from our living room.

2010-12-03T07:51:00.001-08:00

Here we are, already in December. It was a busy month, even after the 11th. In fact, I felt let down after all of the Veterans Day hoopla was over but I still had to do Thanksgiving so the letdown part had to be put off until the day other people went shopping. It's better now but there were a couple of days there that don't bear thinking of.

I don't have any particular memories of Thomas and Thanksgiving--since I am not enthusiastic about turkey, especially turkey that I am theoretically cooking, it's never been a holiday of enormous importance in my mind. Of course, the year that I ordered all prepared dinner from La Madeleine which meant that all I did was pick up a box containing our meal, OK that year I found out that my family really preferred that I cook, no matter how unenthusiastically. We did go to a movie afterwards (Toy Story, I think). They liked that. But I've never bought Thanksgiving dinner again except the year that Thomas died. That year, as I must have written early in this blog, we went out to dinner at Maggiano's in Chevy Chase. The restaurant was incredibly crowded and noisy and the dinner was served family style so there were a lot of elbows flying around and I don't think I've ever been that miserable in my life. It was just me and Richard and Matthew and my mother-in-law Edith who I felt was resentful that we were in a restaurant (she never said anything, I was probably just projecting). But as a friend of mine observed later, we were going to be miserable no matter what we did.

Every Thanksgiving since then has been home-cooked and the day is no longer a focus of misery. I still don't like turkey.

I have some thank you notes to write. Several people had Masses said for Thomas this year, and a contribution to the Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund was made in Thomas's memory (the contributor may wish to remain anonymous, but I am very grateful!). This afternoon, I am meeting a reporter to talk about ways that people can contribute either time or money to our service members. I'm mostly going to point out organizations, including a couple of small ones that I know of, who are doing this kind of work. This is not about me and that is a very good thing.

2010-11-14T13:42:00.000-08:00

Thanks to help from Linda L. this is now posted. I delivered this on Veterans' Day at the Dedication of Veterans Plaza in downtown Silver Spring.

92 years ago today, World War I -- known as the Great War, the war to end all wars -- came to an end. November 11th became such a significant date that, under various titles, it has been observed ever since as a day to honor our veterans and to remember those who have died serving our country. In the United Kingdom and Canada, November 11th is known as Remembrance Day, and people in those countries wear poppies in tribute to the fallen.

Six years ago, this date took on another meaning for my family. My son, Army Specialist Thomas Doerflinger, was killed during combat operations on November 11th, 2004 in Mosul, Iraq. I watched the notification team approach my house with an extra layer of disbelief: how could Thomas have died on this day of all days? And yet, as I later told anyone who would listen, I think Thomas might have picked Veterans Day if he'd been given the choice. He was proud of his grandfathers, both of whom had served in the Navy in the Pacific during World War II. For a while, he carried my father's dogtags everywhere. Neither side of our family could be said to have a military tradition, but what our families did have was a willingness to serve when called upon. And so, when Thomas saw a need, he enlisted in the Army. On the day he died, he had volunteered to go on a dangerous mission because they needed one more soldier.

In the six years since Thomas's death, many more Montgomery County residents have lost their lives while serving their country. As a county, we have decided to honor their memory by naming the Rockville library, Rockville Memorial Library. In May and November, for Memorial Day and Veterans Day, we put up displays at the library commemorating their service. These residents never got to be veterans. They did not come home to raise their families, or tell us funny stories to avoid telling us the horrible stories, or be celebrated in parades. And yet, it is entirely fitting that we celebrate them today along with the living. The veterans we thank for their service were the friends and comrades of our fallen. The sons and brothers, husbands and fathers that we have lost supported these men and women, protected them, and died for them. It is a moment for all of us to consider not only what we lost when they died, but how much we gained by their decision to serve.

Since World War I, blue star banners have hung in the homes of servicemembers who are in harm's way. If the servicemember dies or is killed, the star on that banner turns to gold. It is difficult to be a Gold Star family. It can be exquisitely painful when someone thanks us for the service our loved one gave. Every new death renews our own sorrow. But the gift our loved ones gave us is the legacy of service, of caring for our friends, of understanding that sometimes we must do the difficult thing and reach beyond ourselves. All who have placed their lives at risk to protect the helpless and the innocent have given us that gift, and for that we thank all our veterans.

2010-11-12T16:20:00.001-08:00

I am trying to paste yesterday's speech into this blog but Blogger apparently is not Word-friendly. I will persist, mainly because I am not keen on re-typing the whole thing!

Fox 5 news, a local station, came to our house in the evening to interview Richard and me. I've typed those links in and I really hope they are right! This is pretty frustrating.

www.myfoxdc.com/dpp/news/maryland/veterans-day-marks-somber-day-for-md-family-111110

www.gazette.net/stories/11112010/montnew162839_32646.php

http://tbd.ly/aWv7Nh

2010-11-04T18:31:00.000-07:00

Veterans Day is approaching. I'm supposed to speak for three minutes. What do I say? I've asked a couple of Thomas's Army friends (one has answered already, the other I wrote to just a few minutes ago) what they think needs to be said. If anyone else has an idea, let me know (comment here, or write to my prewittlad@yahoo.com address).

I've been missing Thomas a lot and I've been talking about him more. I worked today and found myself telling a new employee about what happened. She took it well. I don't do this often any more, I think, telling people everything, but talking has been important lately. And, after all, most of my friends have already heard this story so it's pretty much only strangers and new acquaintances who are left to hear it.

2010-10-29T07:35:00.000-07:00

It's been busy, as you might conclude from my long absence. I'm not sure exactly what I've been doing though--that never-ending laundry, sewing a quilt from my son Matthew, housework? I don't know, but here we are.

I am sitting in a Starbucks here in Wheaton Maryland while my mother-in-law gets her hair done in the mall across the parking lot. Hiking over here with my laptop over my shoulder, I see all sorts of people, including the early morning mall walkers. This time, they included a young man: I noticed his foot first, realized he had a prosthetic leg, that he was wearing shorts, and a white t-shirt with black lettering that said "Wounded Warrior Project." He was with a young woman and both of them were very intent, maybe on getting him out of the mall as it begins to fill up with Friday morning shoppers. For a brief moment I wanted to stop him, to ask how he's doing, where was he wounded? but since it seemed unlikely that I'd get through that without crying and he did not need my burdens while he's concentrating on getting well I didn't do it. But maybe he wanted to share his burdens? If I see him again, I hope I have the courage to speak.

Faye Fiore's story appeared in the Los Angeles Times (just go to www.latimes.com and search for Doerflinger)--it was a truly lovely story and the pictures that Carolyn Cole took were great (though I still hate pictures of myself). Just before it appeared, I put on my Facebook status that I wasn't sure how this 15 minutes of fame was going to turn out, and afterwards I thought, "That was about 14-1/2 minutes too long!" but I am really glad we got a chance to tell the story. As a result, a lot of people actually looked at this blog and I hope it gave them some insights into what we've gone through. A lot of people friended me on Facebook too, and now I have a much expanded Gold Star Family. I haven't talked much with them, but I know they are there and that's important.

And, even though I am an introvert, I do enjoy public speaking so on Veterans' Day I get about three minutes to speak at the dedication of Veterans' Plaza in downtown Silver Spring. At least this won't include a temporary eternal flame as was suggested once. I am not big on eternal flames--sooner or later the gas will run out and then what will they do? Better to just light the occasional candle with its limited lifespan--we can keep on doing that for a very long time.

The weird thing about writing this blog is that I do tend to go for several weeks between entries, but I'm always thinking about what I want to write. Then, when I sit down, I end up writing about something that happened that very day instead of all the profound thoughts I had last week. Witness my wounded warrior. And, also this morning, NPR did a story about a memorial service for a soldier held in Afghanistan. I spent most of the story crying so I didn't really hear much except the wind across the microphone.

2010-09-28T10:47:00.000-07:00

It's been an busy month since I last got around to writing here. Some of it was just life (will the laundry ever be caught up??) and some had to do with the Veterans' Collaborative and some had to do with what I guess I can just call the aftermath of having lost Thomas.

First: no, the laundry will never be caught up. Surrender now.

The Veterans' Collaborative (a Montgomery County project) met in mid-September and again I am impressed with the range of groups and people who are dedicated to serving our veterans and their families. This particular meeting was mostly local groups with a couple of people like me who have an interest. Next time, we are hoping to include a representative from the school system as well, to have the needs of students with deployed family members represented. Since our experience after Thomas was killed was worse than it needed to be, I am hoping this will also give us a place to start talking about how to deal with the death of a family member (including non-military deaths).

Growing out of the collaborative or maybe grafted on as a result of last year's panel for mental health professionals, we finally taped our first panel discussion for The Cost of Freedom. This has turned into a community-wide project, with Montgomery College contributing facilities and technical support (OK, this would have died on the vine for lack of know-how without MC). We taped in June and apparently yesterday they put our discussion on YouTube (I have not looked yet because I am chicken). The next panel will have veterans of earlier conflicts talking about their experiences and a later panel will be about women veterans.

And then there was my stuff, I guess you could call it. Earlier in September, I was contacted by a Los Angeles Times reporter, Faye Fiore, about doing a story about a family which had lost someone in the early days of the conflict in Iraq. (Actually, it was sort of a networking web that got us to each other, and that is how this whole experience has gone since the day Thomas died.) Faye, as befits a good reporter, was a very sympathetic listener and the draft of the story that I have heard was lovely. She asked for photographs so a week later the Times photographer came and took pictures for a couple of hours. Carolyn has spent time in Iraq--it was, maybe, easier to talk with her because of that. She was in that convoy of Strykers rolling out of Iraq into Kuwait and I think she understood a little of my ambivalence about this event. She wanted to go to the cemetery so she could photograph at the graveside. I was a little concerned that this wouldn't work well since the marker is flat in the ground but she seemed pleased. She also was charmed by the sight of three deer, obviously trolling for fresh flowers to snack on (I'm guessing that deer and green grass are equally scarce in Iraq).

Talking with both Faye and Carolyn, revisiting events and emotions, it was a little hard. My voice would sort of catch and we'd end up pausing for a minute or two, pulling out the tissues, and then go on. Anyway, the story is supposed to run tomorrow, and will probably be online tonight. I guess we'll see how well we all did.

And then the war intruded again. A member of my parish, Brendan Looney, was killed in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan last Tuesday. Brendan was a Navy SEAL. I do not know the Looney family, but I have sent along my phone number and I will go to the funeral at St. John's on Monday morning. One of the worst things about losing Thomas was just feeling so alone with this loss for months afterwards. There are enough of us now, we will make sure that Brendan's family has someone to talk to.

2010-08-18T16:51:00.000-07:00

My technical skills do not extend to embedding the clip from MSNBC about the departure of the 4/2 Stryker Brigade Combat Team from Iraq: they are the last combat troops and they are driving their vehicles to Kuwait as I type. It is odd to think that this is the end of the Strykers in Iraq. For the last six years really (since I didn't really know about them before Thomas began talking a bit in the summer of 2004), I have been aware that various Stryker Brigades have been in Iraq, in Mosul and then Baghdad. I have prayed for their safety and mourned when they have died. Now it seems that my mission is over too. I feel oddly bereft, even though it is a good thing that they are not being shot at or living in danger of rolling over an IED. But, maybe someone can understand this even if I can't, it's as if that last piece of Thomas now goes too. His part of this conflict is over. Operation Iraqi Freedom has been completed.

Conflict rolls on in Afghanistan--I will still be praying. A new mission.

2010-08-11T16:23:00.000-07:00

It is August 11, 2010. When this started, I noted the 11th of every month as a sort of anniversary. I guess it's a measure of how far we've come that I no longer do that, at least not compulsively. But this day is 3 months short of the 6th anniversary of Thomas's death. I miss him. I miss the balance he gave to our family--the commonsense of a guy who did not like pretentious books, who minded his own business and asked us to do the same, who showed up for dinner and never made his bed when he was home. The loyal friend. But this is where we are: we have our memories and our pictures, and the little bit of writing that he left us. We have two videotapes (got to have those moved to digital media soon) of talks he gave in high school as part of his International Baccalaureate program. In our living room we have a cabinet that contains the papers relating to his death, the cards and letters from friends and relatives and strangers, pictures, and a triangular case holding the flag that draped his casket. I'd so much rather have the warmth of his presence.

2010-07-30T04:04:00.001-07:00

Up early, unable to sleep due to the jet lag that always plagues me when I travel to the West Coast and back, I heard a story on NPR about a Marine family whose father/husband had committed suicide after his Iraq deployment. I wasn't listening carefully to the beginning of the story (not actually being alert, just awake) but it finally dawned on me what they were talking about so I started paying attention near the end. Not precisely a happy ending, but a hopeful one, as the surviving wife and children (teenagers or older by now I expect as this death was four years ago) finally connected with TAPS and were welcomed as the family of a man who had died in the service of his country. The mom has become a peer mentor. The story was very complimentary to TAPS, though the reporter kept giving the entire name, Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors, as if the acronym were incomprehensible.

We had a good trip to Washington. We didn't do any Thomas related things, though staying at my sister's and seeing so much family reminded me of the last weekend we spent with him in October of 2004. But, there were almost no tears this time. Time does change some things about grief.

2010-07-18T05:46:00.000-07:00

Life seems to have settled down a bit, except for the vacationing part. We are going to Washington state in a few days to visit family, and there won't be time to get to Fort Lewis to look at the memorial which makes me a little sad. I am trying to get over the feeling that we have to mark absolutely every occasion having to do with Thomas. This year I did not get to Mass on his birthday for instance and felt a bit guilty about that. But life and the living intervene a lot, and I suppose it's in the natural course of events that our lives sort of close over the hole left by this loss. It's not a seamless closure of course. Though I missed Mass, we did buy a cake for the day, a lovely chocolate cake with frosting balloons on the top. I did not have anything written on the cake. We remembered the birthday when he did not get the first piece and then spent (as his other sister said on her Facebook page) "the next decade bitching about it" though it was not quite a decade as he was 13 the year that happened and he died at 20. We did not sing happy birthday (which really would have been morbid) but we did spend some time talking about Thomas and enjoying the cake in his memory.

2010-06-28T15:03:00.000-07:00

It was time to do some housecleaning today and that meant getting rid of paper (it could have meant getting rid of dog hair or decluttering, but today it was paper). First I looked it in my file drawer which is next to this computer. There was a Penda-flex folder full of past issues of the TAPS magazine, dating from a couple of months after Thomas died I expect: I had not been able to bring myself to recycle them as they came. Anything that came because he had died I sort of considered sacred, whether it made sense or not. But in a fit of rationality and clear-sightedness this morning, I pulled out all but the last one and put them gently into the recycling bin. TAPS has helped me through this, but mostly by the human contacts that I know I can make or have actually made. The magazine has been a reminder that they are there and that I can call on them when and if I need them. Now, however, I have a number of online ways to reach them and I think the sheer bulk of the paper mandates that I get a grip (or release my grip, this metaphor is not working well!).

And then there was the filing system. I file bills and statements by month in the fond hope that I'll weed out the stuff I don't need in a year or so. You can see where this went. I started this system in about 2000 I think--you can't see the bottom of the milk crate to find out--and I think I've sorted about six months of it. Up to today, when I pulled up the crate and a cardboard box I'll take to a paper shredder one of these days. Today, I sorted through 2006, and then 2005. I can see 2004 under there, but as I got to early 2005 and looked at a cell phone bill that still had Thomas's number on it, I thought this was more than I wanted to bear today. It was as if I was closing in on the date of our tragedy. How will I ever go through December of 2004 without reliving the desolation I felt for all of that early winter?

2010-06-17T13:11:00.000-07:00

Louise Penny has put up the blog post I sent her this morning. There are supposed to be pictures but I don't see them--maybe I should let her know! ETA: the pictures are up! Don't know what happened there. You can read my entry at http://www.louisepenny.blogspot.com/ Thank you Louise for helping me to tell the world our story.

2010-06-06T13:14:00.001-07:00

I promised to write a post for Louise Penny for Memorial Day but it hasn't happened yet. My oldest daughter ended up in the hospital with a condition which was ultimately diagnosed as Guillain-Barre Syndrome on Memorial Day and so much we would have planned was put aside. She is out of the hospital and recovering now. This may or may not have been related to giving birth on May 20th to her first child, Leah Claire, who I am happy to report managed to survive and thrive through it all. Just to make it more exciting, those of us who visited Anna in her first emergency room visit all ended up with a lovely stomach virus which has made its way through much of the Doerflinger family--only the dog and Great-grandma have emerged unscathed.

And so, grand schemes of writing about the triumphal renaming of the Rockville Memorial Library are delayed. Just to hold you all over I will post the link to the Gazette article, written by Sean Norris, who had been Thomas's friend in 4th grade. It was lovely to see Sean and I liked his story too, but it was a reminder that he got to finish growing up and move on to adult occupations while Thomas did not. It was a much harder day than I had expected. www.gazette.net/stories/05282010/montnew171820_32578.php

2010-05-28T05:36:00.000-07:00

Dear friends: Today the library will be rededicated as the Rockville Memorial Library. It will be a short (half hour) outdoor ceremony, as long as it doesn't rain, and Richard, my husband and the father of Thomas, will be speaking. It is fitting. The families we worked with will be there, Tom and Carol Barbieri, Paula Davis, Nikki Bunting and the family of SPC (I think he was promoted but that's what's on the website for now) Tony Paci and hopefully Irwin Cohen who started this idea. The display cases filled up in the week after I took that picture--all of the families named here brought items, as well as the family of LTC James Walton. My biggest regret about this process is that we did not contact all of the families--some we just couldn't find and some we had some reason to believe wished to not be contacted but we should not have just assumed . . . It's hard to know what the right thing to do might be sometimes.

Louise Penny asked me to blog about this for her and that will go up on Memorial Day. I will put up a link of course, but I expect to do some writing here as well--my audience here is much different (and much smaller!) so it will definitely be a different post!

So many people have sent their best wishes to us--thank you to everyone!

2010-05-02T05:09:00.000-07:00

Things are moving forward on the library front. May 28, at 11:00 a.m. is the dedication of Rockville Memorial Library. I have no idea of what kind of ceremony is being planned though I think it may be time to ask and perhaps push a little bit to make sure that things we want included are there. In preparation for this, there is a display of items in the Rockville Memorial Library's case: we lent some from Thomas, Anthony Paci's family lent some, and several veterans, still living, lent uniforms and medals. We had hoped to get enough things to have displays in all of the libraries with display cases (nine I think) but there was not much response obviously. They want to do this again in November, and I think that with more lead time they may have more success. Richard and his mother and I went to Rockville yesterday to look at the display and I will try to include a photograph.

I wonder if some of the lack of response had to do with the kind of thing that happened to us--pulling out those items led to more tears, something I had not expected though I guess I should have. It was the first time I had read Michael Bordelon's letter in a couple of years and it was difficult. We put that letter in the display--I hope that people take the time to read it. I did watch the public a little yesterday and they paused to look, but no one really lingered.

My quilting needs to step up a bit as the triplets were born the day before yesterday! All is well but I am experiencing a little "quilter's block". OK, bad pun. And my grand-daughter is now officially at term so in a few days or at most weeks, I will be a grandmother. A lot rests on those tiny little shoulders, as I think we expect this birth to lead to some healing. New life--we are all excited and a little bit sad that Thomas is not here to see her.

2010-04-11T18:10:00.001-07:00

I am beginning to wonder if I'm a little addicted to--this sounds a little odd but--good works. I've done PTA stuff almost continuously since we moved here to Montgomery County in 1993 (I did a couple of years worth in Prince George's County too, but our school was less organized). I would occasionally take breaks of a few months, though thinking back, I'd end up as president of the PTA or in some other position when I returned. My last and longest break occurred the year and a half after Thomas died, though I had to finish out the 2004-05 year because I was president that year. I probably should have quit then but, since I was not thinking too clearly, I did not. However, I did not return as president and took off all of Matthew's 8th grade year (I remember going to one meeting and feeling like a ghost--no one spoke to me) and some of 9th grade in his high school. But then Richard told me he'd sort of like me to start up again--I think it was a bid for normal life maybe. And so I did. A county position came up and I took it, and have found the last three years interesting and fun, and I hope productive.

But now that is coming to an end as Matthew finishes high school. And I seem to be replacing my PTA time with the Veterans' Commission and the Library Memorials and the Gold Star Mothers of Maryland and the informal contacts that I've made with local mothers and with Laurie . . . There is no question that losing a child in war puts you in an unusual position. Not that many people have lost children this time around, thank you God, when you consider the losses in Viet Nam or World War II. But that means there are fewer of us to do some of the same kinds of jobs--speaking and advocating and generally serving as reminders of what has been lost. I feel that this is where I belong now, where I've been put. I just hope and pray that I will continue to have the heart to do it.

2010-03-25T18:56:00.000-07:00

This morning I went to the funeral of the Montgomery County Stryker soldier. I met his mother who asked me "does it get better?" Six weeks, I told her, that's the lowest point, and then you start learning how to live with this. She had other people to greet, people she actually knew, or who had known her son, and so we left it that we would get together soon. But going to my seat I realized that the answer is more complicated than that. It seemed to me that the three weeks leading up to that six week mark were all very hard. When Anne came to see me at about the four week mark, I finally asked her when I was going to stop feeling so desolate. The desolation did pass but it took several months. And now, five years and a few months out, the intensity has faded--I almost miss it. I realized at the beginning though that the body knows how to grieve and will protect itself: that intensity would have been debilitating if it had lasted many months. I still grieve but I am also moving forward with my life.

2010-03-16T04:22:00.000-07:00

And now there is Facebook. I suspect that this is not exactly the culminating activity of the Internet, but it is one of the things that the Internet is getting better and better at--connecting people through these social interfaces. Thus, in the last few days, I have been able to reach out to the mothers of other fallen soldiers, one because his mother has communicated with Michael Yon (I just left a comment on Yon's status) and the other through the network of other fallen in Montgomery County--I've added two friends through that. People will not have to be alone. The Montgomery County mom is also the mother of a Stryker Brigade soldier and it can be lonely to be so far from their base of operations at Fort Lewis (which seems to have combined now with McChord AF base. Makes sense). I sent the friend request to the local mom a few minutes ago and I guess I'll see how that turns out. Finding the other families has been a challenge from the beginning because of privacy considerations, and it has been frustrating. People are certainly entitled to their privacy, but at the same time those who would like to talk to other families locally are stuck with the phone book in trying to find those families. We aren't listed, and I expect we are not alone in that, so even the phone book would be of no help.

All this to say that Facebook may be of great help in relieving the isolation. The Internet has certainly changed both our methods of communication, and the speed at which we communicate.

2010-03-06T17:26:00.001-08:00

On Wednesday, March 3rd, I went to a planning meeting at the Rockville Memorial Library. This is to plan displays and programs (maybe) for the county's libraries and grew out of the discussion at the Veterans' Commission about Memorial Day and Veterans' Day. In the course of Wednesday's discussion, I mentioned the stones the people have been putting on soldiers' graves as a sort of memorial, as well as the many things people have sent to us: quilts, pictures, other things. My remark to this group was that I've developed a little sympathy for the National Park Service which keeps and catalogues everything left at the VietNam War Memorial.

Anyway, the meeting was in Rockville and on the way home I thought I would stop at the cemetery. I hadn't been there since November because of the snow. When I got there I found that Thomas's grave marker had been cleared, as well as Eugene's. And stuck in the base of the vase was a Hershey bar and a tube of Rollos. I was happy to see that someone had been there. I took a picture with my phone and with luck I will be able to upload it here. For an explanation, read the comments on my last entry (March 2nd?).

2010-03-02T19:41:00.001-08:00

This morning, the Washington Post had a story about a hockey player for the Caps who lost his infant son last summer. His little boy lived for 54 days in the NICU of Children's National Medical Center here in DC (the link won't paste but it's on today's front page of the Sports section of the Post: you might have to register to read it but it's free and the story is lovely). Jose Theodore finds solace on the ice, playing hockey, even though he is sometimes overwhelmed with the memory of the little boy he lost, Chace. He has founded a charity to benefit Children's, which in this area is known more informally as Children's Hospital. I read this story about a younger man who has already gone through so much of what I experienced when we lost Thomas--it was a difficult start to the day.

Thomas spent a night in Children's when he was five years old. After years of ear and throat infections that had held back his growth and probably contributed to a small language delay, the pediatric ENT decided that his tonsils should come out (I will never forget the medically accurate if linguistically inelegant phrase "Icky green goo here!"). He wore his bright yellow t-shirt and shorts from Lands' End and walked jauntily up the ramp from the parking lot towards the lobby of Children's, holding his daddy's hand. By the time I saw him after the tonsillectomy, he was considerably more subdued. But, he recovered well and he grew fast in the year following, freed from the cycle of infection and antibiotics, so no regrets about that.

I need to think about this.

2010-02-26T04:40:00.001-08:00

For Lent we have decided to something I read about on the Internet and try to get rid of one bag of something every day for 40 days (you get to skip Sunday). Richard, Maria and I are taking turns and then one day is for household stuff. The bags can be garbage, recycling or donations. For whatever reason, we started with Thomas's clothes in the basement. He had left a bunch of civilian clothes in a portable closet (next up, decide what to do with the closet!) and I at least have been tiptoeing around them for the last five plus years. We did dispose of the socks and underwear soon after he died because they were in a small chest of drawers that we decided would be useful and because no one wants to use someone else's socks and underwear! But, he'd left several winter jackets, a bunch of t-shirts, both plain and with logos, two belts . . . actually there was less there than I'd remembered. Some things he had at Ft. Lewis with him and I think those things must be in the trunk with his uniforms. Some things he left with his friend David, apparently the last things he'd worn before putting on his camouflage to leave because when David gave it to us, it was clear he'd just left them unwashed. I was able to dispose of those (after a year of stewing they were not really salvageable). But the things he left at our house: those were hard. I'd seen him wear almost all of it, with the exception of some of the souvenir t-shirts. Some things, we have pictures of him in them.

Anyway, this turned out to be harder than I was hoping. I spent the time in the basement shaking a bit, though no crying (that was reserved for random moments later). Still, I think I can turn the t-shirts into a sort of memory quilt--they really do cover a wide range of his extra-curricular activities from school and church. Not sure when that's going to be able to happen since I have several other projects in line first and my life is not exactly structured for long-range planning right now. But, I can gather them up and keep them safe until there is time to do it.

2010-02-01T07:51:00.001-08:00

I spent a little time on the phone this morning with a photojournalist* who has spent a lot of time in Iraq. He's beginning work on a project dealing with surviving families: we don't quite fit into what he's trying to do right now, but it was an interesting conversation on several levels. First, he clearly understands his topic very well. He's talked to a lot of the families, wherever they are in the journey. That can be really hard for anyone with an ounce of sensitivity, and he obviously has that. Some of his photos are of men who were killed a few days later--he knows grief firsthand. Second, it reminded me to ponder my own reaction to contacts from the press these days. At first, we really did not want to talk to reporters at all: the potential for exploitation was just too great. And then, when we finally had something to say about honoring the fallen and taking care of the survivors, no one was very interested in listening. I think that is beginning to shift, but I just don't want to go overboard on our end. There is a bit of temptation to say "Look at me, look at me! Somehow, we'll have to make sure maintain a balance.

Finally, I loved telling the story all over again (love sounds a bit strange for such a painful kind of retelling, but it does have a sort of beauty about it). I had forgotten how much of a relief it can be to do this. Luckily, this guy is good at keeping people from monopolizing his life and telephone time so we were not on the phone for hours.

On a totally different topic, I recently replaced the chain on the teardrop shaped pendant my friends had given me in Thomas's memory. I broke the very fine chain that it came with a few months ago so I had not been able to wear the pendant, and missed it. I am happy to have it back.

*I forgot to ask him if I could use his name in this blog, and even though published authors are not shy people, it seems courteous to do this. If he contacts me, I'll put his name in.

2010-01-24T05:42:00.000-08:00

Well, the snow mentioned last time did materialize. There was a lot of it, as advertised, and we still have a few patches in the front yard. Our dog loves to roll in the snow it turns out, and still visits the biggest clump to roll around and scratch. It's supposed to rain today and I expect that will be the end of that particular snow.

Even though I've been physically ignoring this blog all month, I've been thinking a lot about Thomas and grief. It's been harder to simply sit down and write because everyone was home, then when vacation was over, people started getting sick and they were home again! It's hard for me to concentrate under those circumstances--maybe I'm becoming more like my ADD sons as I age. And now that I'm finally here, I can't remember what all of those profound thoughts might have been! So I am going to talk about something I'd like to do this year: a Remembrance Day quilt.

My Scottish friend Barbara suggested this project. She has sent me Remembrance Day poppies for the last several years, and goes to the Remembrance Sunday services they hold in the UK, remembering Thomas for herself. This year she sent video of bagpipers. Anyway, while talking about the services, she suggested that I might want to make a poppy quilt, after I told her about the World War I remembrance quilts I saw at the European quilt show in France in September. This led to an online search for patterns, mostly fruitless. However, there is a quilt store in Georgia (USA) that had a Remembrance Day quilt pattern I could download or a kit I could send for--I decided to buy my own fabrics, partly because by the time I'd found the pattern, my friend Debbie had found some poppy printed cotton I could use for some of the flowers. The pattern has "In Flanders Fields" printed on the last page, and I am going to try to figure out a way to put it on the back of the quilt, at least the first verse. My embroidery skills are probably not up to doing the entire poem. The pattern makes a quilt that is about 70 inches square which is a substantial item--my goal is to finish by the county fair in August, but with the grand-daughter coming, it may be August of 2011!

And yes, I do have baby quilts to do. Not only for baby Leah, but one of Thomas's Army friends is expecting multiples and they will need quilts as well.

Making quilts, writing this blog: both positive ways to deal with grief. I don't cry every day any more, though there are tears pretty often. I'm going to keep sewing and writing, and moving forward.

2009-12-19T05:24:00.000-08:00

It is snowing here, it is snowing a lot. We are expecting "up to 20 inches" or maybe more, who knows? They keep telling us this is the most snow we've had since February of 2003 and I keep thinking "I don't remember that storm." But of course I do, I just don't think of it as the storm of February of 2003. What it really is, is the storm that nearly kept us from driving to Columbus Georgia and Fort Benning to see Thomas graduate from basic training. I spent a lot of yesterday on the brink of tears for one reason or other, but some of it was that they kept talking about this big storm coming and I kept remembering that Thomas *loved* snow, especially when he was a little, and one of the pictures that Anna put on my Starbucks coffee cup (Christmas of 2003) was of Thomas playing with Matthew in the snow.

That trip to Ft. Benning was memorable. They had finally plowed our street so we could get off of it to roads that actually were clear, and leave, but school had been cancelled for the entire week (which annoyed me, I was ready to argue that taking time off to see your brother graduate from basic training should be considered an excused absence). As we drove south, the effects of the cold weather and the snow diminished until by the time we got to Atlanta at about 1 (or 3?) a.m. it was almost warm. It was in the 60s in Columbus when we arrived for the ceremony, just in time. The Army was very organized and actually directed us to the correct location to find Thomas and the events. It was great to spend that time with him, even though we'd seen him at Christmas (apparently no one wants to spend Christmas doing basic training, including the trainers, hence the Christmas exodus). I have pictures somewhere but apparently not on this computer. Later.

When we left, the process was reversed and we ended up returning to the frozen north--well, mid-Atlantic. Anna had to go to work and Matthew had a Cub Scout function to get to, all of which happened, but I sort of wish we'd stayed another day at Benning . . .

2009-12-05T05:10:00.001-08:00

I have watched a lot of television since Thomas died, mostly stuff that everyone else watches (CSIs of various stripes, Law & Orders of various stripes, and a bunch of other crime shows). But last Friday evening there was not much on broadcast channels and I was not feeling like reading so I started channel surfing (Thomas was not really a channel surfer in my memory, despite the availability of the remote). In the course of this I found the Style channel and a program called "Clean House" in which the owner of said house calls this crew in to help get a grip on the clutter. This particular program was about a guy who had lived with his mother until her death two years earlier: he inherited the house and then just didn't change anything or apparently throw anything away and now he was getting married to someone who had similar issues. The resulting mess was breathtaking (literally I suspect for those allergic to dust).

The point of this is this poor man had never been able to give away any of his mother's things. He had a room devoted to her (it had been her office in life), including her clothing. He clearly had been very attached to his mother. I have a portable closet in my basement with Thomas's civilian clothing about which I feel the same way. But watching this man finally allow himself to be convinced that it was time to let Mother's clothing go, to save a few things (a craft project and her typewriter) as reminders: well, I think I'm inspired a bit. It was pretty clear that this lesson applies to me too. There are things I am not going to get rid of ever (let his surviving siblings figure out what to do with the correspondence from others and the various souvenirs he had picked up when I'm gone) but the clothing: it is time to let it go.

2009-11-11T04:24:00.001-08:00

This is the fifth anniversary of Thomas's death. We plan to go to Mass in about an hour, then visit the cemetery this afternoon. Unfortunately it is raining here, the remnants of tropical storm Ida apparently, so this will involve old shoes and not much lingering.

Louise Penny invited me to write her blog entry for today which is an act of incredible generosity for such an accomplished writer whose name is beginning to be very well known indeed (New York Times bestseller list!). The address is http://www.louisepenny.blogspot.com/ I wrote this time about Thomas, rather than our grieving.

And one more thing. It will be announced today by the Montgomery County Executive's office: Ike Leggett has decided to name the Rockville Library the Rockville Memorial Library! After years of campaigning for this, it is going to happen. We are very grateful for this as well. When they put out their press release, I will post a link here.

The anniversaries are kind of strange days I've realized. In other years, I've mourned as we approached the day. This year, the week before was so emotionally difficult because of the Fort Hood events, and also suspecting that something was to be announced at the reception last night with the County Exec. It's just that you reach this point and in fact, the day is easier than expected because you've done so much of the work already. So for this day, my family will gather with a few friends, we will remember Thomas, we will eat and drink, we will celebrate the new life coming --Thomas's older sister Anna is expecting a baby in May. Our happiness will always have a small catch but that is OK.

2009-11-06T12:54:00.000-08:00

It has been a difficult couple of days. Yesterday, a soldier opened fire at Ft. Hood and killed 13 people for reasons no one can figure out. This morning, the mosque he had attended here in Silver Spring was surrounded by television trucks (it's on the way to my youngest child's school). I don't deal well with the deaths of soldiers, and in these circumstances particularly it is difficult, someone who should have been protecting those lives stealing them away instead.

2009-11-01T19:01:00.000-08:00

It's the first of November, All Saints' Day. We are getting closer to Thomas's anniversary and it is hard. Seven, and now eight, members of the Stryker Brigade in Afghanistan died this past week as the result of an IED. One of our fellow campaigners for the Rockville Memorial Library gave birth to a baby boy this week. She posted a picture on her Facebook page of the baby in his car seat next to his father's headstone in Arlington--it seems our hearts should break.

And then this afternoon in the grocery store, I was stopped by a woman who remembered me from our kids' early school days. Her son and Thomas had been part of a newspaper club together in elementary school but she remembered not only Thomas, but the rest of my kids as well, and asked about each of them. It was astounding and touching. But what was even more surprising was discovering that she knows one of the other Montgomery County families of the fallen involved in the library issue. Connections . . .

2009-10-20T13:28:00.000-07:00

I feel awful. This is basically an emotional hangover, not swine flu or a more conventional hangover. Yesterday, I was part of a panel that spoke to Maryland mental health professionals who want to work with returning veterans and their families and even though I feel it went well, it is still very, very draining. I kept thinking of the things I should have said *too* though thankfully I have not thought of anything I should definitely *not* have said. We laughed, we cried. I tried to be honest, and I tried to be a little funny because I think that Thomas would have much preferred it that way. It was not about Thomas anyway, it was about the rest of us and our survival.

After I left the seminar (we were the last session) and also left the discussion after the session where I got to hear a couple of stories of the people in front of me, also heartrending, I moved my car a couple of blocks and went to a restaurant across from the Regal theatres and had a glass of wine and some of the most deadly potato chips I've ever seen. They featured blue cheese and maybe sour cream and chives . . . the wine was a little more conventional. Then I walked around the Rockville Public Library (someday it will be Memorial) for about 45 minutes, checked out a book, and then left to go to the MCCPTA Legislative dinner, a couple of miles north.

I was still wearing my Gold Star Banner pin on my lapel--for some reason I was inordinately proud of my new clothes, including a nice jacket that let that pin shine out--and got to answer questions about what it meant. I don't often wear anything that overtly says "I am a Gold Star Mother" because for one thing, a lot of people have no idea of the significance of the Gold Star. Last night, it seemed to be right and appropriate to begin the education of those who were lucky enough to not know. I think I did it gently, but today I am as exhausted as if I had run a marathon.

2009-10-06T05:58:00.000-07:00

I'm thinking that I will be shifting the focus of this blog very soon from so much reminiscing (which I think becomes a little less interesting as we get further away in time from Thomas's death) to more comment on our current situation. I started writing this in June of 2006 and I am now nearly at the end of 2005 in my writing. In fact, I can pretty much tell you that the rest of 2005 was unremarkable and move on from there! When I look at my calendar, I see a bunch of doctor appointments for various family members including my mother-in-law, husband and myself. Exciting stuff. I will check out the 2006 calendar next time and go on from there.

The Weekend of Remembrance activities were really very nicely done. The dinner on Friday night, the 25th of September, was actually tasty and the speakers and entertainment were great. The blue-frosting cupcakes, I'd recommend skipping. We had assigned tables and our tablemates were a family from Connecticut who had lost their son, a Marine corporal, on August 25, 2006. They were accompanied by friends and in fact the program kept the noise level low enough for us all to have a real conversation. Jordan is buried in Section 60. The actual Time of Remembrance ceremony was on Saturday at noon on the west lawn of the Capitol which was lovely and much easier to get to than the Washington Monument grounds they have used in previous years. As in earlier years, there were short speeches, including one by Kevin Bacon which was very gracious (clearly an outgrowth of his role in "Taking Chance") and various military folks and members of the White House Commission on Remembrance, and H. Ross Perot who is a very generous man and enthusiastic, shall we say? The president sent a letter, read by a member of the Commission. The rain held off until the picnic began afterwards but there were tents. We again ran into our Friday evening tablemates who seemed a bit more relaxed (rain will do that for you) and were enjoying the events. I have their card--e-mail is a wonderful thing.

Dinner and the picnic were organized and funded by Families United. I am very grateful to them for doing this.

The card idea is one that I roll around in my head but keep failing to act on. It would be handy to have these because frankly we are involved at least on the periphery in a number of causes having to do with the fallen and it would be a lot handier to have a business card than to keep writing our e-mail incomprehensibly on the back of scrap pieces of paper. It may become especially convenient now as two things have developed (or continued developing) recently: first, our ongoing struggle with Montgomery County Maryland on the issue of the Rockville Memorial Library (no, we don't want a rock in Veterans' Park which is a wide spot in the median of Rockville Pike and has no safe access by foot nor designated parking; we also are not keen on the "temporary eternal flame" they offered as part of the Veteran's Day celebration which they are trying to keep "low-key"). Second, it appears that there is no appropriation for the White House Commission on Remembrance in the budget that was presented to Congress. This too is a low-cost item which generates a certain amount of goodwill. Letting it expire seems foolish. Ahem.

So there we are. We are approaching the five year anniversary of Thomas's death and I'm seeing some consequences, things that keep bubbling to the surface. Over these years we've resolved some things, but clearly there is a lot left to deal with (including my propensity for ending sentences with prepositions).

2009-09-23T13:39:00.000-07:00

I have been neglecting this, life having once again overtaken me. My mother-in-law, Thomas's grandma, will be moving in with us at the end of this week and the preparations for that have been trying, I went to Europe for nine days because an opportunity arose and, if there is one thing that 2004 taught me, it is that life is terribly uncertain so take advantage when you can; and I've been busy trying to do my last year of PTA activities. This coming weekend is also the White House Commission on Remembrance's annual event: this year it is a Weekend of Remembrance, and it will include a dinner and a picnic. I think it will be good, but I am also thinking it will be sad. I said goodby to Thomas at just this time of year, saw him for the last time on October 3rd, 2004, and it all just seems a little too real today.

*****
Thinking back to that first anniversary weekend (and looking at my calendar!), I see that was when I participated in the race with Julie Werner (described very early in this blog). We did dinner with the guys and then at the end of the weekend sent them back to Fort Lewis. That following week I see that they started on my kitchen and I worked several times. A friend took me to see Porgy and Bess at the Kennedy Center. We received a number of cards and letters around the date, including one from a friend of my nephew in Sacramento who had been touched by Thomas's story and arranged for a Mass for him in the cathedral there.

Because of the kitchen work, we ended up having Thanksgiving in my mother-in-law's petite apartment. No matter how cramped it was, it was definitely better than that first Thanksgiving in the restaurant had been. No one got sick and we all fit in reasonably well, even Gene in his wheelchair.

2009-08-08T20:00:00.000-07:00

Richard and Maria and I spent this evening watching "Taking Chance". Maria came armed with a wad of tissues and a glass of wine, I held on to a tissue, the dog lay down at my feet. They were prepared to laugh at me because I cry so easily (Maria gave me 2-1/2 minutes before I would break down) but from beginning to end you could have heard a pin drop in my living room. Yes, there were tears, but they were not all mine.

Chance Phelps, the fallen Marine whose body Col. Strobl escorted home, was eight days younger than Thomas. He died seven months before Thomas did. They seem to have shared an ability to inspire affection and to get more out of life more than most of us manage in 80 years. I guess we'll send it back to Netflix, but I sort of want to keep it--watching the interviews with his family and platoon felt almost like hearing from Thomas's friends too.

Part of this is because I had lunch yesterday with one of the other November 2004 mothers--it is always good to see her, but it is bittersweet. We talked about our sons' deaths and realized (probably not for the first time, but these things are difficult to remember) that Thomas's body arrived home the day that her son was killed. They were not on the same plane, they almost certainly were not at Dover at the same time. Her son is buried at Arlington and mine is here in Montgomery County. And yet, they are bound together forever in a way by having died in separate pieces of the same action, during a week that saw many casualties. Just thinking now, I realize that Thomas's name was on George Stephanopolis's In Memoriam list that day, but her son, who had died that Sunday morning, was not.

And then today I ran into someone I had not seen in many years, but who had known Thomas as a very little boy. She had kept up with people we knew in common so she knew about his death, but it was a little unsettling to sit and talk about him. It was also comforting. Contradictory notions and yet both true. She sent me a picture this evening of him with a bunch of the kids he had played with while I went to the mother's group at St. Camillus--another piece of his story.

2009-07-31T05:03:00.000-07:00

I worked on November 10th. The photographer came that night. I just remember being aware of the days getting shorter though the weather was pretty pleasant as it had been the year before: there was the late autumn sunshine.

I think that Chris and Rusty arrived on the morning of the 11th (it took a little thought to remember that). Richard and I went to Mass that morning, and then to the cemetery--nothing happened particularly, I don't really remember the visit to the cemetery, just that we did it in the morning. Maria picked the boys up at Dulles and they both went to bed for the morning, planning their visit to the cemetery for the afternoon. When they got up, they put on the Class A's and those awful berets that Thomas had complained about so bitterly--he claimed it was almost supernatural, their ability to disappear. He described getting the beret stretched out into the right shape, finally fitting your head properly, you would set it down, pick it up and find it was someone else's! I never saw Thomas in the beret and I've never even seen a picture of him wearing it so if anyone out there has one, please send it along.

Anyway, the boys put on their uniforms in preparation for their visit to the cemetery. I decided to not go back, but Richard did, Maria and Matthew and I think Anna too, all went with them. It was the first time Matthew had been back to the cemetery since the funeral. Later, Richard told me that they stood around the grave and Thomas's friends told stories about him, and also about things that happened after his death. They figured he was still looking out for them--a grenade that did not explode when it fell at the feet of his friend (apparently duds were very rare) particularly. I went off to Starbucks to drink coffee with Debbie while this was going on, somehow feeling that it would be better for everyone though why I thought this has now escaped me. It wasn't bad, just maybe I should have been there.

The rest of the weekend is kind of blurry. We took the boys out to dinner Friday and Saturday nights both because our kitchen was now torn up and not really usable for large scale cooking. The first night I think we took them to Harry's, a local restaurant/bar which was pretty close by (they closed earlier this year). We had celebrated Thomas's high school graduation there so there were some memories there. The dinner the second night was at a restaurant in downtown Silver Spring, an area that has been restored and rehabilitated in the last few years. Thomas left for the Army before the construction was finished, but when he was home that last July in 2004, we had all gone to the movies (Spiderman 2?) in the new cineplex that was now open in that block. So again, some memories.

In fact, almost everywhere I drive here, there is some memory of Thomas. When I drive down East Randolph Road, a daily occurrence, I picture him with his backpack trudging down the sidewalk from his incredibly distant bus stop, coming up from behind because I had to make a U-turn to get back to him on that road (half the time he would have stayed at school and not remembered to tell me so I was almost always late to picking him up, figuring he wouldn't be there anyway). Yes, I really do miss him every day.

2009-07-16T18:14:00.000-07:00

According to the Baltimore Sun today, we are up to 13 here in Montgomery County. It looks as if the marine in question lived in Olney. Another widow, a child without a father, not much information beyond that. http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/bal-md.casualties16jul16,0,7862321.story

2009-07-15T05:46:00.000-07:00

Back to remembering. There's been stuff going on around us, including another meeting of the Veteran's Commission of Montgomery County and the launching of their website which includes a page showing the now 12 fallen servicemembers from Montgomery County but I'm leaving that for another day.

****

Once we got home from Ft. Lewis, we had to return to our normal lives. The truth is, I don't remember much about the next week or two and even the day of the anniversary is a little hazy, but there are some things definitely happened in the interval that I remember clearly.

Two of the soldiers we met during our trip, Rusty and Chris, had told us they would definitely come out for the anniversary. Maria took charge of keeping in touch and making sure the arrangements happened. So that was taken care of.

I stayed busy from the time of our return until the anniversary. I worked at the fabric store five or six times, I went to the funeral of an old friend's mother, I had the kitchen floor ripped out in preparation for a massive remodel (the tile contained asbestos which had complicated things). I have pictures of the progress of the kitchen--I may attach the one that epitomized the whole project. On my calendar, I have not marked November 11th as special at all. I think the boys arrived on November 10th or maybe they took a red-eye and got here very early on the 11th. It was a Friday. I tried not to think too much about it.

And, one of the other mothers of the four Maryland soldiers who had died in that three day interval with Thomas called me to say there was a Baltimore Sun reporter who wanted to do a story about all of us. I agreed to be interviewed--it seemed time to break our silence officially. Greg Barrett came to the house a few days before the anniversary to do the interview. This poor man--I think he may have asked one question and then I talked for two hours, maybe more. Among other things, I told him I was going to be doing the four mile run for the Team River Runner run/kayak biathlon on the 12th of November and he wanted to me to let him know how that turned out as the story would not appear until the 13th. There was also a photographer who came on the evening of November 10th. He called for the appointment, I volunteered some directions which he claimed to not need (correctly as it turned out). He arrived on time as I remember, set up his camera and light and a screen maybe, then had me sit on the much reviled love seat which had it's back to the front door. We often leave that door open because the storm door is sufficient--at this time, we still had Thomas's Gold Star banner hanging, so with the door open, you could see it behind me in the photograph. The photographer wrote a short essay about this experience that appeared the following week, describing how controlled I had been until he asked me to hold the flag case. At which point of course I fell apart, which I'm sure was both his intention and his fear. The essay was factual but compassionate, and I liked it: maybe it was ego as it was mine alone, but I hope not. It was a bit of a weird experience as the main article was generally correct, but there were a few details that were not quite right--nothing important but it was a little irritating to realize how difficult it is to transmit information accurately.

2009-06-25T15:18:00.000-07:00

I always forget how hard this stretch of time between Memorial Day and Thomas's birthday on the 6th of July can be. A number of things have happened, either to us or around us, and another Montgomery County soldier has lost his life.

Gregory Hamilton, one of the members of the Montgomery County Veterans' Commission, has a cable access television program that he asked us all to appear on this past week. Actually, we taped interviews with him on Tuesday evening. Richard was out of town which was sort of ironic as he was the contact that Mr. Hamilton used, but I went and two of the other families went. We each talked for maybe five to ten minutes, allowing for some editing for the final show.

Sitting with everyone and talking again, a very comfortable thing to do. You don't get to do that with just anyone, because even those friends and family who love you and loved Thomas don't have the same experience and don't have the same decisions to make. It's only recently that I realized that we could get a copy of the autopsy report and yesterday Terry Gross's Fresh Air program on NPR had an interview with the doctor who made the decision that everyone who dies in Iraq and Afghanistan will be autopsied, at least by CT scan. Should I ask for this report? I would certainly be the only one who would read it. I think.

More to think about.

2009-06-11T18:52:00.000-07:00

It's hard creeping up to that first anniversary. Things are happening right now that I think I'll write about instead--the memories will still be there I hope when I'm ready to revisit them.

We are still working on the library naming question. We are now in touch with four of the eleven families in Montgomery County (counting ourselves) and we are united in our desire to see this particular memorial done in this particular way. One of the families has been going to the monthly meetings of the Veterans' Commission formed by the County Executive: a workgroup was formed to discuss the memorial last month and they were invited to take part. This did not go smoothly, shall we say. And then the family got in touch with us again (we'd been in touch periodically) and asked us to go to last Monday's meeting. The public (that would be us) was to be given a total of five minutes to comment at the end of the meeting. Richard prepared a statement. I decided to wing it if I got a chance. There were five of us coming, two sets of parents, and one pregnant widow, which gave us all one minute.

In the event, our concerns dominated the meeting and we all talked throughout. I'm going to insert Richard's statement. We had a very sympathetic audience, including several Viet Nam era vets and some less sympathetic political types (just doing their jobs). I think they all listened. I just don't want to say more until we know a bit more.

Prepared Remarks of Richard Doerflinger
Father of U.S. Army SPC Thomas Doerflinger, KIA Mosul, Iraq, Nov. 11, 2004

Meeting of the Montgomery County Commission on Veterans Affairs
June 8, 2009

Over two years ago, the county named an ad hoc panel to consider names for the new Rockville Library. The chairman seemed committed in advance to naming it after former county executive Doug Duncan, and this idea won support from a bare majority of the panel; but county guidelines forbid naming public buildings after elected officials within five years after their term. Coming in a strong second, supported by some panel members and by letters and petitions signed by almost twelve hundred county residents, with support from major community organizations, was to name it Rockville Memorial Library in honor of the brave members of our county – 11 men so far – who have died fighting for our country in Iraq and Afghanistan. This widely supported proposal sank without a trace. Some say this option is off the table because the county executive would still rather wait out the next two years until it is technically legal to name it after his political ally instead.

Now we have alternative proposals: Allowing people who want to do so to walk through a “remembrance garden,” or putting names on a plaque (or as tonight’s agenda says, a plague) in a county office building. I’m sure these are well meant, but they miss the point. We the families don’t need a remembrance garden – for us, every garden will always be a remembrance garden. The point is not to find places that draw fewer visitors than the cemeteries themselves. The point of a war memorial is to find public, widely visited places where citizens are enjoying their freedoms, and remind them that these freedoms were purchased at a cost. Our son did not die for gardens, or for the right to go to a bureaucrat to find out you lost your fight over a zoning ordinance. He and these other brave men died in other countries fighting for the freedoms and ideals we at home take for granted – the right to assemble, to learn, to speak, to read, to write, to think. The library in our county seat seems a very appropriate embodiment of these freedoms.

But it almost seems the county government is allergic to the idea of honoring the fallen in general. Even the new Veterans Plaza in downtown Silver Spring will not be called a memorial plaza – and the large sign in front of the plaza says special events will take place there on Veterans Day, the holiday dedicated chiefly to honoring living veterans. A veteran is generally understood to be someone who is back from the war. Our loved ones didn’t live long enough to be veterans. Their holiday is Memorial Day, a day not mentioned in materials about the plaza.

And so I return to our original question of over two years ago, which has never received a straight answer: Why not Rockville Memorial Library?

2009-05-30T18:50:00.000-07:00

I had a few minutes to myself late this morning so I decided to go back to the cemetery. We had monsoon-level rains on Monday after the Mass and before the barbecue, and we had them again yesterday but this morning was beautiful and dry and sunny so out I went.

Saturday is an active day at Gate of Heaven. You could see canopies and chairs set out, earth dug up, in one place a marker had been moved, anticipating a new occupant. I got to see all of this in more detail than usual because the little road closest to Thomas was blocked off and I had to walk across the grass to get to him. And yes, I check out the neighbors too (I always think of Thornton Wilder's Our Town which was the school play one of my high school years. Marked for life by a play I didn't much like).

When I got to Thomas's grave, I found the two little flags we had left on Monday planted at the upper corners of the marker. In between them now were two much larger flags, evenly spaced. The tips were different so I assume they came from different people. After I stared at the marker for a few minutes, I realized that there were flower petals scattered around the marker, and after a few more minutes of staring, I found them on the grave too. Those monsoon rains had apparently crushed them and left them soggy, but they also made sure the petals stayed put.

I like knowing people have been there.

On my way back to my car, I stopped at a few other flag-decorated graves. Two side by side had the same last name, one a veteran of WWII, one of Viet Nam. The elder died in 1973, the younger about three months later at the age of 21. I wonder about their story, but I've let their names slip through my memory so I'll never know. But at least for a few minutes today, the traditional Memorial Day, someone honored their memory.

*****
Wikipedia's entry for Memorial Day (at least today's version) has an explanation of the date and observance: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorial_Day

2009-05-24T06:06:00.001-07:00

It doesn't look like I'll be able to go Arlington today--my impulse towards hospitality means that we are going to have to spend today doing some necessary shopping and yard work instead. But here is something I wasn't expecting: MSNBC is keeping a page of remembrances from family and friends of various service members and the son of an old neighbor is there. Someone had told me that Mrs. Avelleyra's son had been killed in Viet Nam but when I met her in 1986 she never spoke of him to me, I suppose because it had been 18 years since his death and also because I was a generation and a half younger than she. I did look his name up on the Wall one day because people should not be forgotten. And now here he is, remembered by his sister: PFC John William Avelleyra http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30891965/

2009-05-23T07:07:00.001-07:00

This long pause of two months needs a bit of explanation. Basically, five days after that last entry, my mother-in-law had a cardiac event. In the end she went to the hospital three times for monitoring, for placement of a stent in a coronary artery, and then for a blood clot that ironically was formed because she was taking anticoagulants. The hospital she spent the most time in does not have internet access for patients which meant that all of my usual activity online was put aside for the duration. She's doing much better now. This doesn't have much to do with Thomas, though one of the nurses while trying to make conversation asked Edith casually how many children she had. So Edith told her that she has two living, and one who died last year. Poor nurse was a bit taken aback so went on to the "safe" question: what about grandchildren? And again, it was five living, we lost her son (pointing to me) a few years ago. Again, I felt a bit sorry for the nurse but that is just the way it goes sometimes.

This is Memorial Day weekend. We are going to have a barbecue on Monday afternoon. We will start the day with Mass at the cemetery. I would like to go to Arlington, but that does not seem practical at the moment. I might be able to carve some time out tomorrow. NPR did a Story Corps story yesterday about the father of one of the fallen of the Stryker Brigade (Nainoa Hoe)--it was beautiful and I left a comment last night. I always feel a bit odd doing that, but I do it anyway: one man's story is the story of all of us. Anyway, I want to visit Michael Bordelon's grave and those of the other soldiers whose names I have learned and families I have met.

*****
The rest of our trip to Washington state was mostly taken up with visiting and doing a bit of sight-seeing. This was the first time I had been back of course since we said goodbye to Thomas that last day and I will admit that it was very hard to be in places that we'd been in together last time. I had spent a good deal of time since his death thinking that I would never be able to go back to Washington at all. The rational half of me knew that was unrealistic: most of my relatives live there and a number of friends and now that I had added Laurie to their number (Laurie is not a great traveler by her own admission but I'm working on her!) it was clear that I really would have to do it someday. But it was hard going on those roads and seeing those places again . . .

Matthew had been four years old the only other time he'd been to the Pacific Northwest so we took him on a ferry to Port Townsend so he could see both water and mountains--unfortunately, the crossing was a bit rough that day and he looked a little apprehensive, not to mention seasick. On Saturday night, my sister had a sort of party for us, including our cousins and many people I had known growing up. It was lovely, and then it was time to leave. Our plane was very early and so we drove to Seattle to spend the night and drop off our rental car near the airport. I don't really remember much of that Sunday at all (except that I left my dental nightguard in the motel room! They did mail it to me a couple of weeks later). And then, it was back to the fray.

2009-03-26T06:55:00.000-07:00

I left us at Fort Lewis in October of 2005. Following that lunch, the guys went back to their work and we moved on to the Tacoma Mall, a place I had spent a lot of time (and money) at as a teenager. Anna had to return to Maryland to go back to work the next day and Maria had decided to go with her as she had school, so they had booked a flight on a red-eye which involved first going to San Francisco and then across the country. Richard and Matthew and I were going to spend a couple of days at my sister's and fly home on Sunday. We got the girls to the airport and drove our rental car up to Mt. Vernon (Washington) to my sister's that evening.

I should have written all of this down at the time because, memory being what it is, I have now forgotten what we did for dinner that evening. I know that the next day, Friday, we took the ferry to Port Townsend from Anacortes. Port Townsend is historic and quaint, a worthy goal, and luckily the sun was shining, but it was windy and that ferry crossing was rough. Matthew looked none too happy about the motion of the boat. Nonetheless, we got there in one piece and found a very nice restaurant with a view of the water for lunch. Following lunch, I met one of my internet friends, Ann Marie, to sit and drink coffee for a very pleasant hour. (As a result of this conversation, I was able to pack up our vast collection of Lego blocks when I got home and send them to her for her kids with strict instructions to wash them first--they were extremely dusty!)

I know this sounds kind of dull and normal, but frankly dull and normal was exactly what I needed. It had been a very, very emotional day at Fort Lewis and just doing every day stuff was a great relief.

I have remembered something from the memorial ceremony at Fort Lewis that I cannot believe I forgot to mention. At the ceremony, Adam Plumondore's Aunt Lisa, who lives in Oregon, handed me a paper gift bag. In it, from her and Adam's mother and Laurie, were a number of fabric pieces, outdoor and patriotically themed, meant to go into a quilt someday. We didn't really speak (the ceremony started) and I have always been sorry that we didn't have a chance to visit.

Further, I never did photograph the shadow box. I will try to do that now and post it.

2009-03-25T14:02:00.001-07:00

Because life is never straightforward, I have neglected this for a month. I've been housing my mother-in-law while she recovers from broken ribs and driving other people to various doctor appointments. I've been doing PTA business which reminds me of an odd intersection with our status as a Gold Star family. Apparently, the Westboro Baptist Church (Fred Phelps group) has decided to grace Montgomery County with its presence in April, picketing a local high school named for Walt Whitman. I believe the consensus is that we, as a PTA certainly, will ignore them. They are also planning to visit Arlington National Cemetery which I find appalling. I can't bring myself to read their website (I had a glimpse) so I'm going on the reading of others. These people are beyond crazy but I guess we can be grateful to them for the formation of the Patriot Guard. The Patriot Guard folks I've met have all been wonderful. If I ever find the patch they gave us, I'll scan it and post it here.

OK, I've written a little. Tomorrow I will try to write a little more, going back to my main theme of remembering.

2009-02-26T11:17:00.000-08:00

It's only a few hours later and, apparently, Secretary of Defense Gates has decided to allow some press access to the returning fallen at Dover. I guess we'll see how this plays out, what the families do and how the rest of the public reacts.

Updating this again: the families will be allowed to decide whether the press is allowed to photograph the flag draped coffins: "WASHINGTON – Families of America's war dead will be allowed to decide if news organizations can photograph the homecomings of their loved ones, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Thursday." (In the way of the internet, I already have lost the original site of the quote, though I think it is from an AP story I saw on Yahoo.com). Here is a link to a more complete story: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29410258

2009-02-26T07:45:00.000-08:00

Things that I want to write about keep drifting by--my brain seems to be having a hard time holding on to one thought long enough to get it written down. The world's theme this week though is press accessibility to Dover AFB when the fallen are returned. There have been articles in the Washington Post and the Washington Times, and yesterday there was a story on NPR's Tell Me More about it as well. Perhaps coincidentally, HBO recently showed a movie based on the true story of the Marine Lieutenant Colonel Michael Strobl who escorted home the body of a fallen Marine, Lance Corporal Chance Phelps. I watched the trailer this morning, and some clips of interviews with Chance Phelps' family, Michael Strobl, Kevin Bacon (who played Strobl), and others involved in the making of this film. Not to be done without a box of Kleenex at hand. http://www.hbo.com/films/takingchance/ has the clips I watched I think (mine came by way of an e-mail). I feel drained, and it's only 11 a.m.

And for those who are wondering, I don't really know what I think about showing the flag-draped caskets at Dover. I know that Thomas was intensely private and probably would have objected to being on display, at least that was true before he left for Iraq. I also know that he told us that if he was dead, whatever we did about his body and burial was up to us. On the other hand, I do not want him to be forgotten, nor do I want his sacrifice and the sacrifice of his fellow servicemembers to be dismissed or tucked away behind a curtain. In the end, perhaps Section 60 at Arlington and all of the other graves scattered throughout our country are reminder enough.

2009-02-04T14:35:00.000-08:00

Our trip to Fort Lewis, October 2005. Soldiers, a wife, Anne, us. (No names for those whose permission I do not have.)

I went to a funeral yesterday for an old friend, old in both senses. We met Rodney a couple of months after Thomas was born: he died late last week at age 80, the victim of Alzheimer's and all of the physical problems that come with it. Somewhere I have a picture of Rodney holding a microphone for Thomas (who looks about 7 or 8) at a parish celebration. Losing Rodney and the others who have died since Thomas's death makes me feel as if the landscape is being thinned out. Fewer people who know what happened, fewer people who knew Thomas. The last time I saw Rodney was at Thomas's wake: he knew why he was there and he was very distressed. It was hard.

Rodney is buried at Gate of Heaven cemetery, a couple of hundred yards from Thomas.

****

Michael Yon. He is an independent journalist who embedded with Deuce Four in Mosul, I think in April or May of 2005. Michael is a blogger and, nearly daily, posted riveting descriptions and photographs of the activities of the Stryker brigade in that late spring and summer. I read these entries avidly (they were linked from the StrykerNews website) because it was the closest I could come to knowing what Thomas had experienced, however briefly, in combat. Michael also talked a lot about the men he came to know, including LTC Erik Kurilla. LTC Kurilla's wife had written to us after Thomas died so I knew Thomas had (in some sense!) worked for him. I was thus more than a bit horrified to read an entry in late July, describing combat operations in the streets of Mosul which resulted in a fairly serious injury to Erik. This blog entry included photographs, some included in the book that Michael published this past year. The dust cover of Moment of Truth in Iraq has the most famous picture Michael took in Mosul: a soldier holding a child who has died, the lightning patch of the Strykers showing clearly on his sleeve. I was confronted by that photo in the Washington Times one morning, so infinitely sad and also so very human.

So. As a result of faithfully reading this blog, I actually knew a little of Erik Kurilla's story when we met him at Fort Lewis that day. He is very tall (6'5" or 6") and dashing, despite the crutches he was still using as a result of his injury in August, a little over two months earlier. He knew who we were, he told us more about the incident in which Thomas was killed, we even talked about the other soldiers whose stories I knew as a result of the StrykerNews forum.

Michael Yon continued to blog from Iraq as an independent journalist, eventually turning those blog entries into a book. One day in 2007, I stumbled across an entry in which he talked about having found a prayer card with the words from "Be Not Afraid", a song we use frequently in Mass (I think the words are from Isaiah). Thomas knew this song: I started crying when I saw it and in fact it's been nearly impossible to sing it ever since then (perhaps not coincidentally, it was used at Rodney's funeral yesterday).

Thank you, Michael.

2009-01-19T05:34:00.000-08:00

Sitting on my dresser are two church bulletins from this past November. What makes them unique (because we have a lot of church bulletins kicking around this house) is that they came from the Roman Catholic Community of Saint Michael the Archangel in the International Zone of Baghdad, Iraq. A parishioner in our church (St. John the Baptist in Silver Spring, Maryland) had been there on business the week of Thomas's anniversary, and had asked for Thomas to be mentioned in the prayers of the faithful. Instead, the priest said that they would just dedicate the whole Mass to Thomas. So, my boy was prayed for, on his anniversary, in the country where he died. I am so grateful to Jim for thinking to ask.

****
The next phase of our visit to Fort Lewis was the Redeployment ceremony. This involved the entire brigade and was a massive exercise. I should have taken notes. We did take pictures (which I'm having trouble accessing at the moment). Approximately five thousand men and women stood in formation while speeches were given, accomplishments recounted, people were introduced. Dave and his family stayed with us in the bleachers (and again we thanked our lucky stars that it was one of the beautiful October days with sunshine and no rain). Eventually it came to an end and we made our way down to the grassy field where soldiers and families were milling around. I kept thinking that Thomas should have been there and wondering if his spirit was with us.

Dave introduced us to a number of Thomas's friends and we asked them to lunch at the local Pizza Hut. As a result, we found ourselves sitting with about eight guys in uniform, having them reminisce about Thomas and his really, really bad driving skills but also about his dry sense of humor and his tender heart. He had not fit in immediately when sent to Fort Lewis--he was about two weeks behind his class of trainees because he had decided (or it had been decided for him) that he was not going to try for Special Forces after all. If he had continued on that path, he would have stayed at Fort Benning for airborne school, and he had thought initially he'd still be able to do that. The Army had different ideas, and wouldn't let him do it. Instead they sent him to Fort Lewis, 30 miles from where I graduated from high school (our back roads used to have "Tank Crossing" signs) and trained him to be a Stryker vehicle driver. This made so much sense: he got his driver's license one month before he left for basic. Anyway, his friends told us how they had initially been rather wary of him, calling him "Doerflinger" but then gradually warming up as they found out who was behind that pale, pale facade. He went from Doerflinger, to Tommy to TG3 (for Tommy Gun cubed, the ultimate cool). They clearly loved him and his quirky ways.

A couple of the guys told us they would like to come back to Washington for Thomas's anniversary and we told them all that we would be happy to have any of them in our home. E-mail addresses were exchanged. It was healing and happy and for some reason, despite all the memories we shared that day, I don't remember that there were any tears at that lunch table. We knew it was realistically our only chance to meet Thomas's friends--the unit was going to be reflagged and these young men were all going to be scattering--we were just glad to be able to be there.

I'm going to leave a note to myself to talk about Michael Yon's blog and the characters from that that we met at Fort Lewis that day next time. Meanwhile, I leave with the Prayer to Saint Michael, patron saint of soldiers, which is printed on the cover of the bulletins Jim brought back for us:

Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle, be our defense

against he wickedness and snares of the Devil. May God rebuke

him, we humbly pray; and do thou, O Prince of the heavenly host by

the power of God, thrust into Hell Satan and the other evil spirits

who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.

2009-01-08T10:31:00.000-08:00

Technical difficulties, not to mention the holidays, sort of interfered with this blog! I hope that my faithful readers (a small but loyal band) have not given up checking to see if I've added anything. I hope to add pictures later, in a different post when we get my computer problems straightened out.

****
October in Washington state can be an iffy sort of month in terms of weather and both of the ceremonies we were scheduled to attend were outdoors. By some miracle, the sun was shining and it was a perfect fall day, not cold, just right for being outdoors. The first ceremony was relatively early in the morning--I want to say 9:00 a.m. but this is one thing I forgot to write down in my calendar! We were escorted by Thomas's friend David and his wife Amber, and David's parents Richard and Kaye, who had come to the funeral. My sister and her husband Mike came, my cousin Peg and her husband Bob (a Viet Nam era veteran) came, and Anne of course was there, poised to remove Matthew if he wished. Richard, Anna, Maria and Matthew and I were there of course as well. I think we had the largest contingent, but that was mostly because my family and friends were local to Fort Lewis.

This first gathering was relatively small, involving the families of the fallen, as they dedicated a memorial to those who had been lost. There were 44 names. Some families did not come, at least one because they were still so deep in their grief. The Brigade had not made provisions for the families to meet each other thinking this might be too difficult, but I did mention later to one of the officers in charge that I thought it might be a good idea if they ever had to do this again to set up a gathering for the families. We clearly do better when we mourn together than we when we are all alone (sometimes being alone is a good thing). They had left boxes of tissues under our chairs, and there were certainly tears. There were speeches, short, and the names were read with each family receiving a shadow box with a small, folded flag on one half and the other side sporting a metal lightning bolt Stryker symbol, and an Operation Iraqi Freedom "coin"--it's behind glass and won't photograph well but I will try later. A small plaque at the bottom says:

SPC Thomas K. Doerflinger

1-24 IN

Greater love hath no man than this,

that a man lay down his life for his friends.

11-Nov-04

2008-12-18T17:47:00.000-08:00

We have a little rhyme for lost things:

Tony, Tony come around
Something's lost and must be found!

Tony being St. Anthony, the patron of lost objects. Tony was working overtime this week in our house: in the space of about three days we found Maria's iPod (missing for a couple of months), Matthew's MP3 player (gone for about one month), and my 2005 calendar which I had not seen since I started writing this blog in June of 2006! I may now have more accurate dates. I find that a comfort.

******

So now I can tell you with some certainty, we left for Seattle and Fort Lewis on October 26, 2005, a Wednesday. When we arrived in Olympia and found the protestors, I wondered if it was because of the Strykers' redeployment ceremony, but it turned out to be (according to the Daily Olympian) because the 2,000th servicemember had been lost in Iraq. I think Thomas was around 1,258 but I also think there is no way to be sure. An unhappy coincidence for us, and I've spent some time since then wondering if I had stood in front of them and announced my maiden name whether some of them would have realized that they knew me. What that would have proved I don't know, but it was disconcerting to think that old classmates could be there. I elected to not embarrass my family and kept my silence.

Dinner that night was to be at Fort Lewis with some of the other families of the fallen. This had been arranged by Norma Melo, who had lost her husband Julian in the dining hall incident on December 21, 2004. Norma is a natural organizer and had put this together by internet communication. Many of us have shared e-mails and she had shared with me that Thomas had volunteered at an elementary school on post, teaching writing. (Norma was recently interviewed as part of a story on NPR about a returned soldier who had worked with Julian.) Some of the families were local and knew each other, some of us were strangers, but eating together did give us an opportunity to talk a little bit.

2008-12-04T15:03:00.000-08:00

I had one of those ambush moments this morning when I opened an e-mail from the Kodak Easyshare Gallery. Kodak is doing a lot of online promotions this month, and I thought this was one of them, not having read the subject line carefully. Instead, it was their picture of the month, and the month was November. A photograph of a soldier in uniform, tidying the grave of a veteran of World War II, the marker much like Thomas's, on Veteran's Day. The picture is here: http://www.kodak.com/US/en/corp/kodakmoment/Veterans2008.jhtml Silly of me--I simply wept.

People worry about saying something that will make me cry. Really, you don't know what will do it. I never know when I will open an e-mail or letter or turn a page in a magazine or someone will use a phrase that will set off the tears. There is no point in worrying about it or feeling guilty if you are the unwitting agent who gets me crying for no apparent reason--it will happen and you were just the lucky one that day.

2008-11-27T05:57:00.000-08:00

It's Thanksgiving. For our family, there have never been any traditional ways of celebrating it--we just responded to whatever was going on at the time. Thus, we went a couple of times to Richard's mother's home on Long Island when she still lived there and the kids were young, some years we invited people to our house (my father's last Thanksgiving was with us in our home in Mt. Rainier Maryland in 1988, twenty years ago), some years we were at my brother-in-law Jim's home, or friends' homes. This year we are going to my daughter Anna's new in-law's home. A hodgepodge of celebrations! I don't remember Thomas being particularly attached to anything but the food . . .

This year, we do have things to be thankful for, notably our new son-in-law Mike and our new puppy (not equally important of course, but improvements to the quality of life, both of them!). Mike and Anna got a puppy too so we plan to put the whole group in our Christmas picture, to go with the usual Christmas letter. We haven't done a picture since Thomas died so this is a milestone.

And now, off to make fresh cranberry sauce and pecan pie, while sitting of course! Have a happy Thanksgiving my friends.

2008-11-26T06:22:00.000-08:00

Sorry for this long pause. November is always a difficult month for us now, and on top of that I managed to get the local cold germ which did not want to let go--I find typing while with a runny nose is an unrewarding experience. However, I am now pinned to my chair because once I got over the cold and felt well enough to run in the park again, I broke my ankle. This happened Monday so maybe I'll be getting a little caught up here!

*****
Trying to remember that day is odd. I know that after we checked in and got to our rooms, we went out looking for lunch. We walked around the several square blocks that constitute downtown Olympia (and have ever since I can remember) looking for somewhere to buy a sandwich--there are plenty of small restaurants there and we did end up somewhere comfortable and casual and a little crunchy in the way a home to ageing hippies is likely to be. I felt as if the streets were full of ghosts: my parents and grandparents, friends from school, the girl I had been in high school, the college student who spent three summers working for the State of Washington just a few blocks away. My husband and children were not haunted in the same way but I think they may have felt a little disoriented.

People kept turning up throughout the day. David and Amber picked Anna up from the airport in midafternoon, and brought both her and some of Thomas's possessions to us at the hotel. They had his laptop computer, and also some clothes that he hadn't wanted to store, though I think they must have just been what he was wearing when he packed up to leave for Iraq. I got one whiff and said: "I am not taking his dirty laundry back to Maryland." It's amazing how long the aroma of sweaty young men can linger. The clothes were not in good shape anyway so we tossed them (the only thing I've been able to throw away, though we did manage to dispose of his socks and underwear finally).

Eventually, Anne arrived from Vancouver and we went back out again with a different goal this time, shopping some of the little boutique places that have sprung up in the storefronts. There was a quilt shop that I recall, but I don't remember what, if anything that I bought there. And then it was time for dinner.

2008-11-11T19:11:00.000-08:00

We survived the fourth anniversary. The day was beautiful, sunny and a little autumnal. I ended up going to the cemetery twice because I didn't want Richard to go alone--he came home from his meeting later in the afternoon, after I had already been with Anna and Mike and Edith (my mother-in-law). It was OK. I probably would have stayed there all day if I could have.

Anna and Mike brought flowers, adding them to some that were already there. I brought a small American flag bought at Fort McHenry, and a Remembrance Day poppy that Barbara sent from the UK. We tucked the flag into the flowers and the poppy into the base of the vase. And then we went across the street to Taco Bell to have a commemorative meal (I had iced tea and nachos, not really that good a combination). The last meal Anna and I had with Thomas was at a Taco Bell and we thought he would have appreciated this gesture.

****
I wrote a guest blog entry on Louise Penny's blog today at her invitation (obviously!). It can be found at www.LouisePenny.blogspot.com

2008-11-06T08:43:00.000-08:00

We are close to the anniversary. In the last week we've gotten a Mass card from a captain who has sent one every year (or had his stepfather send it) and a long letter from Thomas's friend David. It fills in some details for us of their time in Iraq, however brief. David also talked about the two photographs he sent us: one of the two guys at Ft. Knox during training that we displayed at the funeral, and one of Thomas with another soldier in Tal Afar on October 21, 2004. It is good to know--that is the last photo we have of him. (This image is from that picture.)

****

We arrived in Seattle in the middle of the morning, the joint function of crossing three time zones and taking a very early nonstop flight. It did give us a lot of the day to visit with people, have lunch, check in to our hotel in Olympia, walk around trying to cope. It just felt so damn weird to me. Anna had to come on a later flight so she was not with me as I returned to Sea-Tac for the first time since we had said goodbye to Thomas. I remembered meeting him there a year earlier--someone from Fort Lewis had dropped him off and he met us at baggage claim as we arrived--it seemed like he should be walking through the door this time too. Driving down I-5 past the exit to Tillicum where we had said goodbye in a Taco Bell parking lot . . . well, it was hard. And it was mixed up with all the memories of growing up in this area too. I drove up and down this stretch of road many, many times, essentially from the time it was built to visit grandparents, to visit friends, to go to Seattle for various events or up to Canada to camp even to go to the airport for other, happier trips . . . so many memories.

Still, it helped that the sun was shining on this particular day, that traffic was not impossible (after years on the Capitol Beltway, no traffic except maybe Rome's looks impossible!), and that I knew exactly where I was going so at least we were not heading off into entirely unknown territory.

We arrived at the Governor House hotel around noon and parked our rental car in the back. Richard and I went inside to check in and were immediately confronted with the Daily Olympian's issue for that day on the front desk, noting the death of the 2,000th servicemember in Iraq. Names of those with local connections, including all of the Fort Lewis members, were printed in fainter type on the front page, shadowing the story. I found Thomas's name without trying. We did tell the desk clerk why we were there and she expressed her sympathy. Maybe she was aware that across the street behind her people were going to be protesting in the park later on that day. We never did interact with the protesters (Maria doesn't even remember seeing them): maybe we only saw the debris they left behind, candles and signs.

2008-10-24T06:41:00.000-07:00

It's been a long autumn so far. For whatever reason, this one has felt really hard. I've been wearing my Gold Star pin for the last few days--no one really notices (or at least says anything) except the people who already knew about Thomas. And even Maria says that she used to really love this time of year until . . .

*****
For our trip to Fort Lewis, we made our flight reservations on Alaska Airlines. They have a non-stop from Dulles to Sea-Tac which seemed more humane for the non-flyers among us. Also, it got us to Washington earlier in the day so we would have time to visit friends and family before any official events. Thomas's friend David and his wife Amber had been assigned to escort us which seemed logical and right. Actually, a lot of this is kind of hazy which I'm afraid might have been true if I'd written it the week after these events. It was a very emotional time and trying to face Washington state without Thomas was really daunting to me. However. We pulled up our socks and went.

Flying out, it was Richard, Maria, Matthew and me. Anna had to take a later flight due to work. We could not all sit together so Richard and Matthew had seats a few rows in front of Maria and me. For inflight entertainment, the flight attendants passed out what looked like DVD players to each passenger for ten dollars apiece. When she got to us, I asked her if she could tell me how my son was doing as he was very upset about flying. I also told her about the event we were about to attend. She did not charge us for the DVD players and she took good care of Matthew for the rest of the flight, bless her.

We also got boxed breakfasts on that flight: enclosed was what looked like a prayer card with a picture of a beautiful sunset on a beach and these words:

Give thanks to the Lord,
for He is good;
His love endures forever.
PSALM 107:1

2008-10-15T19:07:00.000-07:00

Because she turned out to be so kind (no surprise!) I must mention Louise Penny, the Canadian writer I quoted in my August 29th entry at least one more time. After I put that quote in my blog, it occurred to me that it was rather lengthy for a non-review, even though I had attributed it, and that the courteous thing to do at least was to let the author know what I had done with her words. She not only gave her permission to use the quote, but a few days later wrote to me to say that she would be attending Bouchercon (a convention of mystery writers and readers) in Baltimore this past weekend and would I be able to meet her there? And so I did. She is 6 feet tall which leaves me feeling a bit petite at 5'4". Despite the height difference, I felt very comfortable with her immediately. We met on Friday afternoon and I spent something over an hour explaining what had happened the day Thomas died, and showing her the scrapbook of pictures that I had put together with the aid of many friends this past summer. She listened very intently, asking an occasional question. It's been a while since I told this story, either in writing or discussion and it must have been time to revisit it. Louise turned out to be the perfect listener and I am so glad this all came together so well.

Louise did write about our meeting in her blog http://www.louisepenny.blogspot.com/ on Sunday, October 12.

2008-10-02T09:11:00.001-07:00

I'm having a restless morning. I looked at my own blog, followed a link from the Run for the Fallen entry (which has pictures of Arlington), wandered around trying to figure out lunch. Looking down, I realize I'm wearing the same sweater I had on when they came to tell us Thomas had been killed. And now that I write that out, I realize as well that it will be four years ago tomorrow that Anna and I said goodbye to Thomas in that Taco Bell parking lot outside Fort Lewis.

This would have been my mother's 87th birthday, the Memorial of the Guardian Angels.

2008-10-01T14:15:00.001-07:00

September of 2005. I'm trying to remember the rest of that month and the preparations to go out to Fort Lewis. We were not being very cooperative about that trip--the Army would pay for Richard and me but that would mean that they would make the arrangements and our desire to stay a few days longer might make that harder. Moreover, we had to make our own hotel reservations--a block of rooms had been set aside for the families of the fallen at a motel just outside of Lewis, but I had waited so long to make our reservations that they were fully booked (this was also going to be the weekend of the redeployment ceremony for the entire brigade which meant that approximately four thousand families were going to be staying in the area). In the end, I made reservations at the Governor House hotel in downtown Olympia. Looking at the address, I realized that it faced the park where I had often eaten my lunch as a state worker during the summers of college, that the Greyhound bus station would be off to the right and that my old high school friend Karli lived on the same street but a couple of miles away. My parents grew up in Olympia, lived there when young, moved back in middle age, then both of them died there in the 1980's. My grandmother had owned a house up on the hill that overlooked the downtown area. In fact, this trip was going to be hard for more reasons than Thomas.

The thing was, when Thomas was assigned to Fort Lewis, I had been a little exasperated to find that after all of my moving around the country, my kid had ended up 30 miles away from where I graduated from high school. It was both a kindness and a sorrow when I had to go back after his death. I wasn't sure right after he died that I would ever be able to set foot in Washington state again, but the months that passed let some of that feeling pass as well.

Meanwhile, I had started hearing from some of the other Maryland families as a result of my project with Governor Ehrlich's office. I still talk to two of them regularly, Linda Faulstich and Elsie Bowen (they don't do e-mail!) but mostly these were one time contacts as I realized that I did not have the energy or resources to pursue this as vigorously as I had hoped. Still, I think it did some good. One mother called me and said that she didn't know what she wanted to say, and then she spent an hour and a half on the phone with me, telling me her story and her son's story. I think that telling one's story is important and can be very healing. Knowing that your story and that your child's story not only will not be forgotten, but that they are appreciated and understood--that is an incredible feeling. I think it helped that day.

2008-09-18T16:16:00.000-07:00

The last couple of days have been busy. Last night, our county executive held a town hall meeting, open to citizens enterprising enough to get the attention of the moderator with the microphone. I went with Paula Davis, mother of Justin Davis who lost his life in Afghanistan in 2006. Paula wanted to remind the county exec about the library naming (you may recall, a movement last year wanted to name the library in our county seat "Rockville Memorial Library"). She and I had not met before, though we had e-mailed each other not long after Justin's death. Over an hour into the meeting, Paula finally got the moderator to hand her the mike. She made her statement about the servicemembers we have lost here in Montgomery County asked why the library had not been named "Memorial." As the meeting moved on, a staff member came over go tell Paula that there is a new Veteran's commission in the county and that the question of creating a memorial is certainly on the agenda in the coming year. We took his card and we plan to call.

I also e-mailed Louise Penny yesterday (see Aug. 29th). It seemed only courteous to let her know what I had done and why. She was very gracious in her reply and asked me if she could put my note in her own blog so here it is: http://louisepenny.blogspot.com/ She got this so completely right and I am happy to be able to thank her.

2008-09-11T06:38:00.000-07:00

This is a link to a blog entry about a war memorial unexpectedly discovered.

http://philangelus.wordpress.com/2008/09/11/death-and-the-soldier-and-the-virgin/

On this day, September 11th, let us remember the victims of war.

2008-09-10T06:42:00.000-07:00

Time to get back to my story. Aside from election stuff, it's been pretty quiet out here.

*****
Remembering that September, three years ago now!, we concentrated on getting Matthew back to school and I worked fairly often at the fabric store. I have now lost my calendar for that year which is really annoying because I keep a lot of information in my calendars so I can't give exact dates without more digging than I want to do right now. Sometime at the beginning of the school year, I realized that the principal who had been at the middle school since Anna was in 7th grade (initially as an assistant principal) had opted to move to the central office of the school district. I did not know his replacement at all well though she had been in the school the previous year and in general I felt much less comfortable entering the school. Some of it was undoubtedly just being very self-conscious about Thomas's death and the reaction or lack of reaction that I had gotten from the school. I can imagine the staff throwing up their hands and asking what I wanted from them. I don't know what I wanted. Thinking back on it now, I realize that they, like me, were operating without a manual and that this situation was not fair to anyone.

So that was hard. I also had this minor surgery unfortunately involving anesthesia and recovery which interrupted my training for the Team River Runner event in November. And we were planning our trip to Fort Lewis. Matthew really did not want to get on a plane, which was tough, but we did manage to convince him after much heartburn. We chose to fly on Alaska Airlines because they had a nonstop to Seattle from Dulles. My old friend Anne is retired from the Air Force Reserves but had done two years in the Army on active duty when we were all very young so she knew Fort Lewis. She offered to take care of Matthew if he decided he couldn't handle the memorial ceremony because she could go on and off post without the paperwork involved for visitors. My sister offered to host a party of sorts on the Saturday after the event, inviting our extended family and our friends and acquaintances from western Washington and Oregon. We began to get our ducks in a row and prepared to meet Thomas's Army friends.

2008-08-31T18:07:00.000-07:00

Just a quick little update to my entry on the Run for the Fallen: one of the volunteers, Kathi, had read it so she sent me an e-mail with this link to a story in Stars and Stripes http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=64171&archive=true
At the bottom of the story is a link to video of the end of the race and the speech, as well as the time we spent in Section 60.

This is a link to Kathi's blog: http://journals.aol.com/kasee267/SupportingtheTroops/ Thank you Kathi, and all of those involved in Run for the Fallen!

2008-08-29T15:07:00.000-07:00

I've been reading a mystery (I'm almost always reading a mystery!): this one by a Canadian named Louise Penny. The book is called The Cruelest Month, an allusion to T.S. Eliot's assessment of April. Lots of poetry, a strong story of good and evil and how we tend to encompass both. But what struck me about this book was a short passage when Armand Gamache, the protagonist, enters the village church which oddly is named St. Thomas:

He'd been in St Thomas's often enough and on this fine morning knew light from an old stained glass window would be spilling out onto the gleaming pews and wooden floor. The image wasn't of Christ or the lives and glorious deaths of saints, but of three young men in the Great War. Two were in profile, marching forward. But one was looking straight at the congregation. Not accusing, not in sorrow or fear. But with great love as though to say this was his gift to them. Use it well.
Beneath were inscribed the names of those lost in the wars and one more line.
They Were Our Children.

Here is a fictional story about an imaginary village that somehow manages to capture a truth that eludes my local elected officials. Remembering our dead is important. Remembering why they died is paramount. Remembering that they loved us makes sense of it all.

2008-08-25T08:28:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, Richard and I went to Arlington National Cemetery to witness the end of the Run for the Fallen, a relay that started in California in June and crossed more than 4,000 miles, a mile for every one who had died in Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom, Afghanistan and Iraq. The runners left a marker at every mile commemorating the individual servicemember. Thomas's is somewhere in Colorado. Because there is no running inside of Arlington, the run part actually ended at the Metro stop entrance, just outside the gates. There was a very touching speech from the back of a pickup truck by the young man who organized this (and I really hope there is video available somewhere, there were cameras) who described this event as a living memorial. I liked that. There were tears. There was no pontificating. In this most political of years, there were no politicians.

We all walked into Arlington, to Section 60, where the brother and father of one of the fallen spoke briefly, and a Marine in uniform played Taps. And then we visited graves, leaving
flowers and stones on the markers. Richard and I left carnations on Michael Bordelon's grave, and then visited others whose names we've come to know, or whose parents we have met. Nicholas Ziolkowski and David Branning, Marylanders who died the same week as Thomas. T.J. Barbieri who lived in Montgomery County--T.J.'s anniversary was August 23rd and his marker was surrounded by flowers and pictures. Steven Auchman who was killed in Mosul two days before Thomas. Others whose names we recognized and whose stories we had heard.

It's a difficult thing to do, visiting Section 60. Too many young men and women who could have been friends. Too many grieving families.

Anyway, I encourage any of you reading this to explore the website of Run for the Fallen: http://www.runforthefallen.org/ They have links to other memorial sites and I spent some time last night looking through them. And if any of the organizers read this, Thank You guys.

2008-08-16T08:01:00.000-07:00

My oldest daughter Anna got married last weekend, 08/08/08, on the Assateague National Seashore. It was beautiful and sad in a way: Thomas was not there, but his friend Christina was, and his folding chair came with us too. I think this chair had been to Iraq with him: it's khaki colored, one of those sling chairs with a cup holder in the armrest. His aunt Holly sat in it to watch the wedding and I stood to watch from the side so I could see everything. At the reception, Maria toasted her sister, and alluded to her brother, but this was Anna's day and sadness was not allowed to stay.

******

August 2005 came to a close. Pat, the woman who had worked at G Street and had given me such wonderful advice and support from the beginning, retired at the end of June so I was on my own now in learning how to cope with loss. Juli Werner had talked me into doing a race to benefit wounded soldiers (a part of the Wounded Warrior project) that was to be held on November 12. Juli would kayak and I would run, carrying Thomas's dogtags. I've talked about this before (my post of 10/17/06) so I won't go into it again but I did have some concerns about this. I was not going to be able to train, even half-heartedly, for some of the time because I had to have some minor surgery in September, and at the beginning of October we were going to be gone for nearly a week to Washington state and Fort Lewis. Still, the run was not that long and no one would have laughed if I had to walk part of it (which in the end I did for a bit but still had a decent time (for me!)).

School started for Matthew. It must be said that this was not going smoothly from an academic point of view. He was never that enthusiastic about school, but this was definitely a step down, and has continued to be a problem, though it must also be said that the issue is homework. Thomas never did homework either so this was not terribly surprising. I had decided to back off from PTA involvement as the previous year had not gone well for various reasons and because I was now taking care of my mother-in-law: she was living near us but not driving so I was taking her to doctor's appointments and the grocery store (and I still am!) and there are only so many hours in a day.

2008-08-01T13:34:00.000-07:00

One of the things I've observed since the beginning is that unexpected things keep popping up. People appear with a story, or a reporter asks a question, or someone sends a memorial item they have made (quilts and afghans, a candleholder, a painting). Some of them add to the information we have and others just offer comfort.

So, the last two days have been like that. Yesterday we received a packet from the Department of the Army: Army Long Term Case Management office. In a way it was self-generated because when they made the initial contact, I asked them for the paperwork to get a Gold Star Pin so we could apply for the Maryland Gold Star Family license plates for our cars. Yesterday the paperwork came, along with a pin.

One thing I had not expected to receive in this was the final Report of Casualty. We had copies of the interim report, which came immediately and allowed us to get access to Thomas's bank account and other things. On there, box 4f which is labelled "circumstances" says "Determination Pending." The final report has instead: "Hostile Action: Gunshot wound of the head, per DD Form 2064 (Certificate of Death)." Even though I knew that was the cause of death, seeing it in official print was a bit of a shock. Nearly four years later, I still avoid thinking about the cause of death. This will sound odd or something, I don't know what. But, when we got his body a week after his death, there really was no visible wound. This may be a tribute to the mortuary art, or he may have been hit in the back of the head (though I don't see how this is possible, given descriptions of the incident from those who were there). Maybe I'll just be grateful for now and look for more information later.

When Richard came home yesterday, I showed him the packet and the Report of Casualty of course. He knew I had asked for this. He saw the pin, a lapel pin with the gold star on a purple background surrounded by a wreath of laurel, and took it out of its box. And then he pinned it to his blazer lapel. He did ask if I wanted it, but I have other pins.

Today an offer of a prayer shawl in Thomas's memory appeared in the mail. Though I think of prayer shawls as a more Jewish aid to worship, this seems to be from a Catholic group which is local to us. I know there is a movement out there to do these, but I don't know much more than that--I guess it's time to find out more! I'm a little surprised to get this nearly four years after the event, but perhaps this group did not form until recently.

Still, as I started this post, things keep turning up. Who know what tomorrow may bring?

2008-07-30T15:50:00.000-07:00

That summer of 2005 was also when I tried to start a sort of support network for the Maryland families who had lost a military member in Iraq or Afghanistan. After the Governor's reception in April where various staff members had given us their numbers and told us to contact them if we needed them. So, I did, telling them that I was interested in forming a sort of support network for the families of the fallen, with myself as contact person (though if someone else had volunteered that a structure was already in place, I'd have gone with that). The governor's office was encouraging, and asked me to write a letter detailing what I had in mind so they could run it past the attorneys. I had to do it this way because there was no readily accessible place to get the names and addresses of the other families, and concern for privacy and sensitivity to other issues played a part too. As it turned out, there was at least one family that did not want to be contacted by anyone. My proposal was that the governor's office would pass on a letter from me to the families which would protect everyone's privacy and give folks the option or not of responding.

I wanted to do this because there was no structure in place at least within the Army, to support us (there is a program now but I'm not that impressed so far). We were on the other side of the country from Fort Lewis and its community of survivors and the men that Thomas served with were still in Iraq and not really available for discussion either. The only people who could understand what we were going through were the other families. I had saved phone numbers from the reception in April, and used them, and I did now have Laurie and the others from the StrykerNews website, but I was sure that there were others out there feeling just as isolated as we had felt. We needed each other.

I will confess now that this project ended up taking more energy than I could muster up in the end. Other groups like TAPS and Gold Star Mothers began to emerge as more important. I did receive phone calls and e-mails from about eight families of the approximately 60 at the time that had lost a servicemember. Two of the women I've talked to I've stayed in touch with ever since, Linda and Elsie, who both lost sons in 2004. A couple, we just needed to tell our stories once and that was enough, including the woman who called saying she didn't know what she was going to say and then stayed on the phone with me for an hour and a half describing her son and what happened to him. But in the end, I just didn't have the energy to make more of this project and when Governor Ehrlich lost the next election, I did not take it up with the new governor (though I hear that he has continued holding receptions).

One last result of this was that I was asked to speak at the reception in August of 2005. They called only a few days before which was fortunate (less time to agonize) and I did write a decent speech I think. Anna and Richard came with me on the day. It was hard to deliver and I got hugs from a lot of people afterwards but I was really glad I did it. The text may be lost in the shuffle from computer to computer but I will try to find it.

I think by this time I was feeling less desolate and more resigned to the loss. It was still hard but, though this may sound awful, we were getting used to it. I was just trusting that this was normal reaction--you really cannot keep up that level of pain for very long without severe consequences--and I also kept remembering that the culture of earlier centuries gave you a year for deep mourning. It became clear that there was wisdom in that, and I relaxed a bit.

2008-07-13T18:31:00.000-07:00

I'm going to give this its own post. It has to do with other mothers. Sometimes I feel like a magnet for other bereaved mothers. On Friday the 11th, I worked at the store and found myself helping a woman maybe ten or fifteen years older than me who wants to hang a quilt her daughter had made and needed ideas about how to do it. Several people tried to describe our favorite method but then I just said let me show you and took her to our calico department where she told me that her daughter had died which was why she wanted to hang the quilt rather than use it. Her grandson, the daughter's son, was with her and my heart broke for both of them.

And the night before, a fellow employee who lost her own son on Thomas's 3rd anniversary, talked to me a bit about how hard the 11th of any month has been since he died. I know all too well what she means.

One knew my history, the other did not, and somehow we all ended up in the same place.

2008-07-13T06:08:00.001-07:00

Sorry, I took off wandering through our more current situation. There is still quite a bit to say about 2005, the year of consolidation, as I think of it.

*****

Richard and Matthew and I enjoyed our trip to Arizona. I kept thinking that Thomas would have loved it--he really loved the desert landscapes we had travelled through when he was younger--but then I would think, he spent the last few weeks of his life in a country that is mostly desert and he might not have felt quite so friendly toward it if he had returned. I still loved it, despite my speculations about Thomas's possibly ambivalent attitude.

Coming back to the DC area meant rejoining something like normal life. I have already told the story of my strange evening at the fabric store. We were deciding to go to Fort Lewis for the memorial dedication ceremony at the beginning of October, though it was going to be a logistical challenge to get Anna (who was working full-time) and Maria (who was taking classes at Catholic University) out there and back with minimal disruption. Matthew was worried about flying that far after our trip to Phoenix (the flight back had been a bit bumpy and then the lady in the seat behind him had a "cardiac event" which was a trifle alarming). I was scheduled for some minor surgery in September which was going to require a little healing time, and I was also supposed to be training for the Team River Runner biathlon with Juli, described earlier in this blog. Nonetheless, it seemed important for us to go and I spent a good deal of time making the arrangements, both flight and hotel, much to the dismay of the Army which had intended to do both. In the end, I waited too long to get rooms at the hotel where some of the other families were staying near Fort Lewis, and we ended up instead with a hotel in downtown Olympia, Washington. Since I grew up there and spent my summer vacations working for the state within a few blocks of this place, I knew exactly where we were going. It was going to feel a little odd--my family has a lot of history in that town--but I had no idea of how odd it was going to get.

2008-07-06T05:47:00.000-07:00

This would have been Thomas's 24th birthday. He was here for his 20th, his last birthday, but I cannot find any pictures which is frustrating and sad but not all that surprising. Since this is Sunday, we will go to Mass. It will not be for him, we did not ask for this day, but we will pray for him. I would like to go to the cemetery but we have a friend coming to stay this afternoon--I'll try to go anyway.

I woke up early this morning, remembering the day that Thomas was born. He got me up early that day too. He was born at 3:15 in the afternoon, and that is also the time he died.

Just some random thoughts. I wish he was here.

2008-06-23T12:25:00.000-07:00

This is a link to a story that NPR broadcast this morning about the Section 60 mothers: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=91737118#share

I have talked to some of these women and e-mailed many more and I am on the e-mail list that sent the message around when NPR expressed interest in doing this story. My son is not buried in Arlington Cemetery's Section 60 at his own request: he wanted to be closer to home and to us if it came to this, but it leaves me feeling very alone sometimes. There are days when I wish he was at Arlington, if nothing else, to give us a firm identity in the national conversation. Other days I am grateful that his grave is only 15 minutes away, close to all of us.

And then there are the days like today when I wonder just how all of this came to be.

The Section 60 mothers did talk about the friendships they have formed this way and yes it is a horrible way to meet people, but the friendships are a blessing our sons gave us when they could no longer give us anything else. I am so grateful for the women who have become my friends in the time since Thomas died: Laurie and Linda and Elsie and all of the others (I ask permission to use their names here), women who are all very different from each other and from me except for this one overriding fact of having lost our sons in war.

Time to dry the tears for today, and move on.

2008-06-21T17:33:00.000-07:00

A strange interlude for me, though one I should have navigated months ago. I have been working on the scrapbook I started in January of last year because I am going to a retreat with the women from my internet board on Thursday--they have listened to me and prayed for us and for Thomas for years now and I want to show them a little of who he was. Thus, the incentive to get this thing done finally (or as done as possible, I suspect it will always be a work in progress). It has been very, very draining to go through all of these pictures (forget the mementos, I can only keep track of so many things). Some things I had forgotten we had and some I just found so unexpectedly painful to look at . . . I will try to do a rubbing of his dog tags though before we leave.

One thing I had totally forgotten was a picture from nursery school: the Thanksgiving play. He was dressed as an Indian (this was 20 years ago!) and across the front was written "Brave Warrior." It took my breath away for a moment.

I've had to order some prints of things that seem to be surviving only on the computer and I hope they get here by Wednesday so I can add them in. To my great surprise, a memory card from the digital camera I had in 2004 had not been erased so when I took it out, there were 80 pictures on there, among them those I took at my sister's in Washington just before Thomas deployed. I actually had those pictures stored in my computer, but they had been transferred a couple of times and were showing signs of degrading a bit so I am very glad to have more pristine copies.

2008-06-10T08:21:00.000-07:00

In August, we went to Phoenix for Richard's conference. It was a nice trip, though hot and unusually humid for Arizona. When we were planning the trip, people kept saying "but it's a dry heat": what they failed to note is that Arizona has a monsoon season and we were landing in the middle of it. The hotel actually flooded the night before we arrived and we spent the entire week with the subtle aroma of mold drifting through the air. But it was a nearly complete change from the atmosphere, both literal and figurative, that we had been living in here and it was a good trip. The only dicey moment occurred on the bus trip to the Grand Canyon when the tour guide pointed out a hill and trail that had been renamed for SPC Lori Ann Piestewa who had been killed at the beginning of the conflict in Iraq. He clearly was afraid that her story was being forgotten (she was wounded and subsequently died at the same raid in which Jessica Lynch was captured) but I think that the there was very little reaction among the people on the bus, all of whom knew about Thomas. There is very little likelihood that any of those people will forget that American soldiers have died in Iraq.

Later in August, I had a very strange evening working at the fabric store. We were a bit understaffed because of a quilt club meeting in which several of the managers were participating, and as a result, I ended up working all over the store. This meant that I helped the same customer three times who finally told me that she was shopping for a (sewing) machine for the museum at Walter Reed where they were going to be displaying bones from Civil War soldiers. I asked if the families had given permission and she did say that they had done their best. From there she began talking about the old prosthetics they had on display and how the new stuff was light years ahead of the old ones: this conversation flowed naturally and it was one I would have had without a second thought before Thomas died (I will talk about anything) but suddenly I knew I had hit my limit and was going to cry in front of a customer. I never speak about Thomas to my customers but now I knew I had to, and so I told her that I had lost a son in Iraq. She began to tear up and I was clearly crying so I told her "We have tissues behind the registers" and pulled out our industrial size roll of toilet paper so we could wipe our eyes (there is nothing like toilet paper to lighten a very heavy moment). We did chat for a bit after that and I told her his story and how I'd balked just a tiny bit at the thought of the autopsy, but she told me they learned a great deal from these scans that was helping soldiers in the field which made me feel a bit better about it. She'd spent time at Dover, she may have been there the day they brought his body home. I realized that these people never see the families, maybe they can't do it emotionally, but that our encounter had made the families real to her.

Anyway, I think both of us changed our perspectives a bit that evening. I still see her from time to time in the store and she asks how we are doing--and I do the same for her.

2008-05-24T17:56:00.000-07:00

Here we are at Memorial Day weekend already! The first part of May has been filled up with PTA activities for me, but I think that there are actually no meetings left for the school year now. Whew! Thomas always tolerated my PTA involvement though he was a little disturbed by the way I kept meeting his friends' parents at these events so I would hear things . . . I'm still hearing things, occasionally, about him or the effects of his death. However, an entire generation of high schoolers has come and gone since he graduated in 2002 and very few people I run into now know about him. Sometimes I will mention him without mentioning his death which always seems a bit weird, but then sometimes it's not relevant. If I use his name, I will usually tell people what happened. I did wear a little pin with a gold star on it (it looks like the banner we had on our door) to the Wednesday night banquet, but the print of my dress was so busy that I don't think anyone saw it. I was all set to explain though . . .

This Memorial Day has just been difficult for a number of reasons, though it's hard to say what they are. Gene's death, I suppose. A serious illness that has cropped up in my extended family. Others in my circle who have encountered health problems in the last month. And then, this year it seems like newspapers are paying more attention to the meaning of Memorial Day. Both the Washington Post and the Gazette newspapers (local weeklies) have done stories on the local fallen, including Thomas. It's been sort of like trying to decommercialize Christmas except in this case, we have the White House Commission on Remembrance campaigning to get everyone to take a moment of silence to reflect at 3:00 pm local time on Monday the 26th. They have moved the Day of Remembrance event to September this year--I'm not sure how I feel about that.

We also received a letter this week from a man who had seen our letter to the Washington Post about naming the Rockville Library "Memorial". He was also concerned that his current county of residence was resisting naming local schools for the two soldiers from there who have died: I've talked to the parents of both soldiers (one is Linda Faulstich, whose son Raymond died in August of 2004). It is incomprehensible to me that there is so much resistance to memorializing our fallen. Even "politics" seems like an inadequate answer, though it is the standard answer here in the suburbs of our nation's capital.

In any case, we will go to the cemetery, Gate of Heaven, on Monday for Mass at 10 a.m. and then visit Thomas's grave and Gene's nearby. I am growing salvia in blue and white that I will cut to put on his grave. I have a small flag I bought at Fort McHenry to leave as well. It will be crowded, as it has been every year, but the weather should be clear and lovely.

2008-05-11T06:34:00.000-07:00

Thomas, First Communion Day, also Mother's Day, 1992

It's May 11th, 2008. It has been exactly three years and six months since the day that Thomas was killed. It's also Mother's Day here in the U.S., a sort of irony for me. Thomas made me a Mother's Day card for the last one he spent here at home with us in 2002. For some reason, he had it opening the wrong way, as if he'd taken to a Hebrew form of writing. I keep it out on my dresser as it shows a simple drawing of a tall blonde boy hugging his mother. I think: he is still hugging me, every day.

At first, I would be aware the 11th of every month. It is actually a day already full of meaning for us: our wedding anniversary is June 11 and my father died on April 11. In the last few months though I've noticed that the 11th can slip by and I won't have particularly thought about the number of months since Thomas died. Maybe this is a a sign of healing. Maybe it's a sign of a busy life. I don't think I'm ready yet to let go of active grieving but it is beginning to shift: like going from an acute disease to a chronic one. We have Memorial Day at the end of the month, that will also be a milestone of sorts. And Laurie's son Chase's fourth anniversary was on this past Thursday, May 8th. My calendar is full of days that I am going to remember for the rest of my life.

2008-05-07T03:56:00.000-07:00

Sometime later during the summer, I think during July, we received an invitation to come to Fort Lewis at the end of October for a dedication of a Memorial that would include Thomas's name and the redeployment ceremony for his unit. This caused a certain amount of turmoil in me and in the rest of my family, though there was never any question that we would go. After Thomas died, it really seemed to me that I might never set foot in the state of Washington again. However, most of my remaining family lives there, as well as several friends who've been part of my life since junior high and high school: obviously I was going to have to get over it and go home sometime and this seemed like the moment to do it. Still, I put off doing anything about it for many weeks, as we tried to figure out who could go and how long we could stay.

A more immediate challenge was getting ourselves to Arizona. Richard's office was holding its annual meeting in Phoenix at a resort (cheap rates in Arizona in August). It seemed that we really ought to go. They were planning a day tour to the Grand Canyon, and we could stay on and do some tourist things once the conference was over. The girls could not go (Anna was working, Maria was both working and taking a class) but we could take Matthew (who was not overly-enthusiastic but didn't have much choice in the matter). I like to travel and I had always wanted to see the desert southwest--this looked like a great opportunity to get away from our somewhat overwhelming situation and see something new.

Thinking back, I was still in a state of both wanting everyone I met to know that I had lost my son in Iraq, and not wanting to be noticeable at all. I was still prone to start crying at inopportune moments, frequently while I was driving, but sometimes when I was just talking about topics I would have considered emotionally neutral if anyone had asked. Going to Phoenix meant that we would be in a place where no one outside of the conference would know what had happened unless we told them. I could practice just not saying "my son died in Iraq." Three and a half years later, I still rehearse these words in my mind, trying to figure out under what circumstances I could say them without bursting into tears, or even just trying to condition myself to say them, not casually exactly, but matter-of-factly. It hasn't happened yet, though from time to time I get close. But in Phoenix I could just let this be a private matter without inflicting it on strangers.

2008-04-22T13:32:00.000-07:00

So, back to the summer of 2005.

I had gone to New York to meet with Anne and her family, then her husband returned home while her son came with her to our house outside of Washington. We did a lot of tourist things: the Spy Museum unexpectedly being sort of a hit with Matthew, and visiting the West Wing of the White House. For anyone who is interested, the Press Room really was in dire need of renovation, or at least a really good cleaning, and I do not begrudge the press corps the improved quarters they received recently.

July brought us Thomas's birthday. This turned out to be unexpectedly hard, though I guess we should have realized. Both of the parishes Thomas had ever belonged to had Masses for him on that day: St. John the Baptist in Silver Spring, and St. James in Mt. Rainier MD. As we have not mastered the art of bilocation, we sent Maria and Matthew to the St. John's mass and took Edith to St. James, where our Cardinal Archbishop, Theodore McCarrick was saying the liturgy. This was coincidence but it was nice nonetheless, and Cardinal McCarrick said a few words about Thomas before he started. We were happy to be back in the parish where all of our children were baptized.

A couple of days after the birthday, I got a phone call from the lender of one of our car loans. I had totally spaced this payment, which was done by coupon, and mailed it at the very end of the grace period. Of course they didn't get it on time and they were wondering where their money was. My dialogue with the customer service rep was a little odd, as I told her that yes, I had mailed it the day before, and then she asked me if the money was a problem. And at that point, I told her no, money was not the problem, that we had lost our son in Iraq the previous November and that his 21st birthday would have been earlier that week. I ended up crying and she ended up saying no problem, they would not put a late fee on the payment (I think she must have marked that account permanently, because I was late one other time and never heard a word). I never meant to tell her that, but she was very kind and it seemed important to me at that moment to appear to be a responsible person, if distracted by my grief.

2008-04-10T12:59:00.000-07:00

Every now and then I remember an event or person and think "I can't believe I forgot that." One of those events was in May, between the announcement of Sergeant Bordelon's death and his interment at Arlington.

Sometime in March or maybe early April, Richard had gotten the idea that he wanted to have a sort of open house to thank the people who had helped us, materially and spiritually, in the days and weeks after Thomas's death. The major difficulty was that we had not kept any sort of list of who those people were. Some were obvious: the folks who brought us food came back to mind pretty well. But the people who just passed through offering their condolences and sometimes their memories of Thomas, or the man who left his Bronze Star with us (he had earned it in Viet Nam but he felt that Thomas deserved it more than he did), those people were harder to find. We compiled a list and sent out invitations; though I forgot to tell people to please pass the word they did it anyway. This is what happens when your friends are drawn from a pool of volunteers. I'm sure we missed someone which bothers me but we did what we could to reach everyone.

And the day itself was lovely! The sun came out (we thought this might be Thomas's first miracle, though in Iraq his friends were compiling other stories of his intervention). People came and ate and drank and laughed as we felt ourselves thawing out, rejoining life. It was still hard, but it was becoming more apparent every day that some things that had been impossible to contemplate in the beginning were beginning to feel doable. I'm sitting in my backyard now typing, just where we had our little party. The sun is out and the squirrels are being their usual nutty selves. There is still bamboo growing back here that Thomas and his friend Brian had planted when they were in fifth grade and trying to build a fog pond (successfully). At the party too, we felt surrounded by happy memories of our son and brother and friend.

Though we knew we were going to be attending the service at Arlington, we still felt more hopeful about the future than we had for the previous six months.

2008-03-28T17:21:00.000-07:00

Gene, Thomas at age 14, Bishop Lori and Fr. Kazista at Thomas's Confirmation, 1998

My brother-in-law Eugene died last Saturday night, Holy Saturday. Eugene was injured in a car accident in March of 1967 and spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair, functionally quadriplegic and with short-term memory problems and other cognitive issues. But he could think, he could respond in church, he knew the words to all of the songs we used. He just never understood the significance of September 11th because the World Trade Center was finished several years after his accident: it was not part of his life or memories. He did, however, understand when Thomas was killed. At the funeral, he turned his wheelchair so that he could see the casket (he could not really turn his head by then). It deeply affected him for a week or so, and then we never mentioned it again. This may seem odd for someone like me who is adamant that her child not be forgotten, but Gene's state of mind was so fragile that I could not make him revisit that grief. Thomas had helped bring Gene to church on Sundays, and had asked Gene to be his Confirmation sponsor and I think that his death may have been the beginning of Gene's decline.

Gene's grave is only a few feet from Thomas's.