12. A Little More About Me

"Don't wish me happiness - I don't expect to be happy all the time...It's gotten beyond that somehow.  Wish me courage and strength and a sense of humor.  I will need them all." 

~Anne Morrow Lindbergh

I guess you could say I was a "different" child.  Maybe "intense" or even just "a worrier" are slightly nicer terms.  I found it difficult to make friends for many years at school, took everything very much to heart, and became emotional to the point of delerium - whether it was insisting after a 4-week trip back home that I wanted to live with my family in Scotland, blaming myself for the loss of my unborn baby brother, crying myself to sleep every night after my stint as the lead character in the musical "Annie" came to an end, or becoming more than just a little obsessed with movies like "Titanic" to the point that I watched it 14 times in the movie theater and wrote journals about marrying Leonardo DiCaprio...yeah, I know, I know, believe me.  It was all a little silly, to say the least.  But back then, I didn't have the perspective or experience - though much of it I wish I still didn't have - that I do now.  When I had my heart broken for the first time at the age of 17 by a boy I thought I loved at the time, I immediately assumed that life was over and that I'd never recover.  I had no idea of what was to come.  Being the overly-dramatic child I was in those days, I'd sit and imagine how I'd handle some truly catastrophic or tragic life event, like being diagnosed with some sort of terminal illness or losing a friend or family member to a horrific accident.  When Jon came into my life a few years later, I always felt I could have handled any of these worst-case scenarios, difficult though they might be, with him by my side.  He was my rock.  Like he once told me, at the end of the day, all that mattered was that we had each other.  I never thought God would be cruel enough to take that away from me...after losing Jon, I often asked in anger why, oh why, if there even was a God, would He do this to someone who was clearly so ill-equipped to handle this kind of loss.  

I still don't know what the "right" way to deal with all of this is, but I think I've tried just about all the options - both good and bad.  I'd like to think the Army has brought me down a notch or two from the overly stimulated emotional state I always found myself in as a kid...and maybe it's even helped me to acquire a little more common sense than I had in the past!  But I don't know...my time away from the support systems on which I've come to depend while I was deployed to Iraq was hard, and Haiti, for some reason, was even harder.  I don't think I necessarily handled these situations well, and I find it somewhat discouraging that things seem to be getting harder, rather than easier, as time goes by.  Even while Jon was still alive, the anxiety and worry I've always struggled with manifested itself in slightly less drastic ways, like when I went through a phase of eating next to nothing and over-exercising to the point that people started to comment on my gaunt appearance.  That phase coincided with Jon's tour in Korea - I guess I just dealt with his absence during that time by shifting my focus from something over which I had no control to something over which I could exert some influence, like my weight and physical fitness.  When he was deployed to Iraq (both the first and second time), I experienced a very similar phenomenon.  And when he died, I literally ate nothing for two weeks.  I remember people putting plates of food in front of me and pleading with me to take a bite of something and my dad bringing me cafe lattes from Dunkin' Donuts every day - "at least they have some calories in them," he would say.  I never drank them.  It's all left me asking myself why I can't just be a little more "normal" when it comes to handling the challenges life throws at us along the way.  I know there will undoubtedly be more difficulties in the future - maybe none quite as devastating as the loss of my husband, but I know I will lose other people in the years ahead and I dread to think how I will deal with it when the time comes.  I suppose time itself will tell.


Jon and I literally took hundreds of pictures during the time we spent together - and thank goodness we did.  In the 5 years since his death, however, there have been a mere handful of pictures taken of me.  I just don't enjoy seeing the sadness in my eyes reflected back at me as I look into the camera.  One of my friends recently watched a slideshow I created of Jon and I's story and commented on the fact that she has never seen me smile as big as I did with him by my side.  My friend is a fellow widow - she didn't know me back then during that incredibly happy period in my life.  I still can't bring myself to do what I see others do when I visit Arlington National Cemetery, which is to take photos with the headstone of their loved one as though he or she is able to pose for the pictures with them.  Maybe that will change for me one day, I don't know.  Until then, I guess I'll keep "dealing" in the only way I know how.  Sometimes I think this whole experience has changed me considerably; other times, I think I'm probably just the same, if not more so, than I was before.  All I know for sure is that Jon loved me for exactly who I am and never once tried to change me - for that, I loved him and I always will.