Memorial Day 2018, Part 1

It's been over a year since I wrote in this blog, a sign of healing, moving forward maybe, or maybe just an exercise in denial.  I still miss Thomas, and I think about him daily, but life has settled down greatly since those early days.   I forget sometimes how very much it hurt when they told me he had been killed.  The ambush moments nearly disappear and I do not seek them out.  Nonetheless, they still find me occasionally, and one of them got me on Memorial Day.  Well yeah, you might say, Memorial Day is bound to be a vulnerable day and I should have been a little more prepared but here it is:

Since moving to Washington state, very few people (comparatively) are aware of our Gold Star Family status.  We've been to several events with the American Gold Star Mothers chapter here but for the most part we've stayed quiet.  This year I suggested to my husband that we go to Dupont so I could run with the original chapter of Wear Blue:Run to Remember and then we could go to Ft. Lewis and visit the Stryker Brigade memorial there, possibly seeing a couple of the guys who  had served with Thomas.  This would let us honor and remember Thomas within a community, but quietly, which is what I think he would have preferred.

So, that is what we did.  I emailed Wear Blue to let them know we were coming, made a hotel reservation near Gunpowder Park where they meet up on Saturday mornings, and let a couple of Deuce Four guys know when we would be on Ft. Lewis (or JBLM as it is now known, old habits die hard!).   The morning of Memorial Day we caught a bus provided by Wear Blue to the park, about an hour before the run was scheduled to start.

Oh my gosh.  There were hundreds of people, there was food, there was a banner with the names of those KIA in OEF/OIF, there was music.  It was huge but I knew that a couple of other Gold Star moms were going to be there too.  Somehow, we spotted each other (and no, I don't really remember how we did that because we weren't dressed in our customary white and I didn't know the first mom I talked to at all before that day).  I am so glad that I got to meet them!  I also got to greet Lisa Hallett, who I had met several times on the Blue Mile of the Marine Corps Marathon in DC (Thomas's big sister Anna ran for Wear Blue in the MCM in 2016 as a Gold Star Athlete).

Around 9 the official event started.  We had a couple of short speeches, a prayer, and a gigantic Circle of Remembrance, and then the run began.  We went in waves, running through the park and the surrounding neighborhood with the help of the Dupont Police Department (and maybe the fire department too?  I was pretty dazed by then).  I followed in the footsteps of many, many people, remembering not only Thomas but the young men and women whose families I've gotten to know over the years since 2004.  I remembered those families too, the moms and dads and siblings, and the wives and children of the fallen.  I remembered those still fighting and prayed for them to come home safely.

It was a three mile run, not timed, just steps to dedicate, steps with purpose.  I chatted a little with others but mostly just ran in my own zone until I turned a corner and realized that they had put up  placards with pictures of the fallen that I was used to seeing on the Blue Mile of the MCM.  They were in chronological order because some of those names I knew of course and I counted down, past Chase Whitham whose mom had been the first Stryker family member to contact me, and then I saw Thomas's face.  This was my ambush moment and I just sobbed, all of that grief still there.  An arm went around my shoulders and I was surrounded by a little family concerned to make sure I was all right.  They kindly stayed with me until I calmed down and was able to smile again, and we took a couple of pictures because in this era of cell phone cameras, that's what we do.  I bless them every time I think about that moment.

Eventually I finished the run, met my husband, had a little lunch and then walked back to the hotel.  I showered and we headed off to Ft. Lewis to the memorial park.

Beginning again

So, it has now been eleven years since Thomas was killed in Mosul, Iraq.  On the 11th anniversary, 11/11, the weather was perfect, as it had been here that day.  This is what we did:

Anna and I aimed to run 11 kilometers in honor of 11 years.  In the last year, a local meet-up of Wear Blue: Run to Remember has gotten very active in Columbia, Maryland.  They usually meet at Centennial Lake, a man-made lake in Centennial Park (go figure), because it is about 2 and a half miles around the lake on a paved path that is well-maintained.  These meet-ups usually happen on Saturday mornings but the leader, Chris, proposed a Veterans Day meetup in addition.  Much conversation ensued and we all settled on 7 a.m., with Grandpa Richard designated as child-minder and dog-walker, while Anna and worked our way around the lake three times.  Leah's other grandpa, Bob (an ultra-marathoner and a veteran) came to run too, and Jessica, one of the chairs of the Montgomery County Veterans Collaborative brought her baby in a stroller, and a number of the Wear Blue regulars came as well.  We held our Circle of Remembrance, and we all remembered Thomas (Army Specialist Thomas Doerflinger echoed around the circle) and then we ran in the gorgeous, breezy morning, realizing we had all done a very Thomas thing.  No one thought to set their various GPS devices or pedometers to metric measurements as opposed to miles.  So, in the end, we kind of guessed our way to the 11 kilometers and probably overshot a little.  It was wonderful.  Matthew is the best runner of us all, but he's been climbing rocks in Kentucky for the last few months so had to do his purposeful miles on his own.

Anna had to leave for work so we headed directly home from the run.  Maria arrived mid-morning and we set off for Columbia again to have lunch together!  (Food featured heavily in this day.)

Maria had to head back to southern Maryland late in the afternoon, but we did stop at the cemetery for a few minutes before she left.  Peaceful.

We had pizza and beer (and wine) and toasted Thomas with friends in the evening.  It was a nice evening, surrounded by friends and family as we observed this anniversary.

Beginning again though:  Today I realized that it has been 11 years since the day after the funeral.  This is really the day when we paused and began to think about how the future would look.  There was nothing left to plan, just the aftermath of a death.  Over the next few months we would have to replace the refrigerator and redo the bathroom (both taxed past their limits by intensive use during November), figure out how to claim Thomas's bank account, sort through some of his belongings and just close the door on others for a while, try to connect with his friends and continue to watch the accomplishments and trials of Deuce Four.  We had to figure out how to live with knowing we weren't going to see him again.  Still working on that.

So here we are.  The weather today has been beautiful, a little breezy again, a little cooler than it's been for a while.  Despite the autumnal feel to the air, it also feels hopeful.  Yesterday was grim and grey with rain and fog but overnight it cleared out, making way for blue sky and sunlight.  Kind of a metaphor really . . .

This picture is obviously not everyone who was with us that morning but it's who we caught before they left the parking lot, all sweaty!