3. "The President of the United States regrets to inform you..."

Everyone who has ever heard those words will likely shudder at the sight of them.  Ironically, it's one of the few things they get right in the movies...but when the scene plays out in real life, the tears and the heartbreak are far from staged.  And it doesn't matter how you think you'll handle it or how you imagine you might act if it were ever to happen to you.  There's no preparing for the moment life changes forever.  

I thought by the beginning of 2007 that Jon and I had made it through the worst of the deployment.  He even said it himself - now that his unit had reached the half-way mark, it was safe to start counting down the days until he would return home.  I guess we both spoke too soon.  Only a week or so before he left the wire on what would be his last combat patrol, he was given the responsibility of planning a memorial ceremony for four Soldiers who were killed in action in a hostile incident.  This type of assignment wasn't usually his job, but the S-1 (the unit's HR officer) was on leave and thus the tasking fell on Jon's shoulders.  Once the official notifications had been made to the families of the fallen Soldiers, Jon wrote the letter that was sent to the remainder of the families back at home to inform them of what had happened.  When I later received his personal computer among the personal effects his unit sent back to the United States from Iraq, there was a folder on his desktop with photos from the ceremony of Jon narrating from the very same podium where his friends would stand only a couple of weeks later to share their stories and memories of Jon and the three Soldiers who died alongside him on April 7th, 2007.  

Things first started to take a downward turn on April 6^th, 2007 when I was informed that my mom, while visiting family in Scotland, had been admitted to the hospital with multiple pulmonary embolisms.  As I later learned, if left untreated, embolisms of this type can travel to the heart and prove fatal.  Reeling with this news and overwhelmed with the stress of upcoming law school exams, I decided to drive to our apartment in North Carolina for the weekend.  When I heard the knock at the door at 5:30pm on Saturday, April 7^th, I was about to pour myself a glass of wine.  The knock startled me – no one knew I was in town – but I thought little of it because the last time I was at the apartment, I bought a year’s subscription to Easy Home Cooking from a kid selling magazines door-to-door.  This knock sounded no different.  There was no way to know what was about to happen.  It couldn’t happen to me, to us – Jon was sitting safely in his office on FOB Warhorse.  He was the logistics officer.  Logistics officers came home to their families. 

When I peered out through the peephole, I could see two Army uniforms.  Everyone knows that a visit from uniformed officers is never a good sign.  I, however, believing Jon to be invincible, did not make the obvious connection and opened my door.  I barely had time to confirm that I was his wife before attacking them with questions:  “Is he injured?   Please tell me he’s just injured?  Is he ok?  What’s going on?”  When one of the officers stated flatly that they had to come in to talk to me, I lost all semblance of control.  I dropped to my knees and screamed “NO!” over and over again.  I had to be physically removed from the doorway and escorted to the living room before they could deliver those awful words that are all too familiar to anyone who has lived through this nightmare:  “The President of the United States regrets to inform you…”

            I would later learn that Jon was killed in Zaganiyah, Iraq, during what turned out to be one of the bloodiest months of the war.  I saw pictures of where the trigger man sat as he peered through a tiny hole in the wall of an abandoned brick house and blew my husband’s 12,000-pound humvee to smithereens with a 500-pound Improved Explosive Device (IED).  The bomb caused the truck to flip up into the air and land to the rear of where it was travelling along a dirty, unimproved road.  The crater created by the IED was five feet long and two feet deep.  There were four other Soldiers in the vehicle with Jon that day.  Of the five of them, four were killed, and although the fifth and final Soldier miraculously survived the blast, he has since undergone almost fifty surgeries to repair the extensive damage to his body from third degree burns.  Both he and Jon were thrown approximately thirty feet when the blast ripped the heavily armored door off the left side of the truck.  Jon was still breathing when he was placed on the MEDEVAC helicopter, but he did not survive the short flight to the nearest hospital.  When I spoke to Jon's boss at a memorial ceremony at Ft. Bragg later that year, he told me that, in his opinion, Jon’s death was the one from which the unit never truly recovered.  Jon, he said, made him a better leader and a better man.  He said that while he sat at the IED site on April 7^th, 2007 and watched the sun go down and the stars come out, he could not help but think that were Jon one of those stars, his was the one that would have shone brightest in the sky.  He said that it is always those stars, the ones that shine brightest that we do not get to experience for long, but that we are glad we did – the ones that burn forever in our memories.

            The few weeks following the news of Jon’s death were a blur of disbelief.  I numbly stumbled through the process of picking up the pieces of my broken life, unable to fathom Jon’s palpable absence in this world.  The headlines announcing his death consumed the front page of every local newspaper and anonymous signs saying “God Bless Captain Grassbaugh” and “Thank You Soldier” popped up all over his hometown.  On April 18^th, 2007, firefighters and police lined the funeral route despite the pouring rain, American flags appeared on every mailbox, and veterans of the Korean and Vietnam Wars drove in on motorcycles from all over the country to shield us from a group of protesters outside the church.  If I were to see any of those protesters again now, I’d probably offer them some choice words but I was too grief-stricken at the time to do anything other than show up at the allotted time and place armed with an arsenal of tissues.  I filled Jon’s open casket with a framed wedding photo and letter and fiddled with the insignia on his dress uniform – Jon would never have forgiven me if I let him go dressed in a uniform that was anything less than pristine.  As I leaned over his casket for the last time to kiss the thick coat of makeup masking his beautiful face, my brother-in-law played “Time to Say Goodbye”, a song I have been unable to listen to ever since.

During all this, I ate nothing for two straight weeks and became gaunt and listless.  My brother-in-law, an Army doctor, told me that he could smell the ketones on my breath.  In other words, my body was eating away at itself as the muscle I had worked so hard to develop began to atrophy.  After two trips to the hospital, I was a physical wreck.  I knew of nowhere I could run and hide because everything around me reminded me of Jon.  Because she was still recovering in the hospital, my mom could not be with me until the burial services at Arlington National Cemetery.  When she did arrive, she pulled me onto her lap and held me in her arms as if I was still a little girl who she could somehow protect from what had happened.  There was nothing, however, that she or anyone else could do to shield me from my new reality.  I watched the world continue to turn and people cautiously continue on with their lives, yet I was paralyzed, rooted to the spot.  I thought that if I could only change places with Jon, I would.  I thought, please, if there's a God, just take me now too and let me be with him.  Being here without him just made no sense - it wasn't logical.  How could everything I loved be gone in an instant after blossoming for years into the beauty of our life together?  How could such a good man be gone at the age of twenty-five when criminals lived on to the age of ninety-nine?  How could this happen?

After dating for two incredible years, Jon had sent me a pair of painted “wedding ducks” from Korea.  The ducks were accompanied by a card that explained that these ducks were so emotionally connected to one another that when one duck is sad, the other is also sad.  When one duck is sick, the other is also sick.  The ducks are the definition of soul mates and remain together forever.  But here’s the problem – what happens if one duck dies?  What happens to the other duck then?  What happens when you get a raw deal because no one thinks to ask for your permission before snatching away your soul mate and you’re only twenty-three years old and you find yourself left with a life that means nothing without that one person who made it mean everything?   I spent months trying to answer this question.  Some days I made it as far as my couch in the living room and just sat there all day watching mindless TV - as long as I didn't have to think about my own little world, I could pass the time.  Other days I felt like I had to physically do something, anything, so I rescued a dog from a local animal shelter – something I had wanted to do with Jon – and got two memorial tattoos, one of the Gold Star and another of the American flag in the shape of broken heart.  Below the broken heart are the words “Loved Always & Forever.”  These were the words Jon and I had used to sign every letter, card, and email, and they were also the words we had chosen to inscribe on his headstone.  I wore the wedding ring they had retrieved from his finger on my right hand, deflecting the awkward inquiries when I didn’t feel like explaining myself to unenlightened strangers.  Whenever the question did arise in conversation, I continued refer to Jon in present tense as my husband – we didn’t get a divorce; he is still my husband and I am still his wife.

In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Dideon writes that “grief has no distance.  Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.  Virtually everyone who has experienced grief mentions this phenomenon of “waves”…a feeling of tightness in the throat, choking with shortness of breath, need for sighing, and an empty feeling in the abdomen, lack of muscular power, and an intense subjective distress described as tension or mental pain.”  Despite all my efforts at distraction, I remember many a night alone in my empty apartment, lying splayed on the floor having drunk too much wine, uttering these guttural, animal sobs of physical torment.  I literally would gasp for breath, unable to draw enough oxygen into my lungs or stop the torrent of hopeless agony that wracked my entire body.  When I could finally breathe again, I would call Jon’s voice mail over and over and leave messages telling him how much I loved him and needed him to come home to me, as though he were just permanently deployed.  I don’t remember how long it was in the end, but for months I didn’t – couldn’t – bring myself to cancel his mobile phone line.  We had a family plan - we were, after all, a family - and I was unwilling to give it up.  I needed to hear the sound of his voice, and I wasn’t ready to let go of my ability to pretend that he was still out there somewhere. 

When I heard that the rest of Jon’s unit would return from Iraq in November of 2007, I finally had to come to terms with the fact that he wasn’t coming home with them.   I did my best to mentally prepare myself for the homecoming ceremony and resolved to meet the plane when it pulled onto the tarmac at Fort Bragg.  I couldn’t do it – I showed up and lingered for a few minutes alongside excited families with small children waving their American flags before bolting back to the safety of my car.  Jon was one of twenty-two paratroopers from his squadron killed during their fifteen-month deployment and one of sixty-seven fallen Soldiers from his Brigade, but the knowledge that I was far from alone in my loss did not comfort me.  Ultimately, I became friends with fellow war widows through a support group. I clung to the every-other-week meetings like a life-line because they were the only thing that made me feel normal and less alone.  No one really knows what to say to a twenty-three year old widow, yet the women from the support group echoed my inner thoughts as clearly as if they could see through my cracked outer shell and read the language of my innermost grief.  They were, after, all, native speakers of this language.  We commiserated about those pesky extra pounds of “widow weight” and joked about the concept of “widow-brain,” a phenomenon that makes even the most able and intelligent of us forget how to accomplish the simplest of day-to-day tasks.  We complained about the fact that although none of us wanted to be members of this “club”, we all found ourselves involuntarily committed to a lifetime membership.

I read every report I could get my hands on detailing the incident that had taken Jon’s life to try and answer the questions that tormented my every waking hour.  I even requested the autopsy pictures of my husband’s lifeless body just to be sure that they hadn’t made a terrible mistake.   I grilled the members of his unit for any and all information as I tried to fit the pieces of the interminable puzzle together.  Knowing more about what had happened did not change the bottom line, and yet I literally couldn’t rest without knowing all that there was to know.  I was hungry, greedy even, for the knowledge.  Who knows why these little details matter so much?  You become so focused, so fixated on one little issue that you lose sight of all reason and logic.  I thought a thousand times about the last conversation I had had with Jon earlier in the week before he died.  Had I told him “I love you” before hanging up the phone that day?  What were the last words we had said to each other?  How had I managed to miss his last phone call to me the night before he died?  I looked back on that night as being among the last moments of my nice, normal life before everything I believed in became tainted and unclean.  That part of me that believed that bad things don’t happen to good people died the next day with Jon and I became a hardened, heartbroken realist.

For months, I found myself writing everything down – every precious detail, every precious memory.  I feared forgetting what had made Jon who he was, so I made lists of everything he did to make me laugh and every place that we had ever visited that held some significance.  I would literally be in the middle of washing a glass or loading the washing machine when one of these memories would come to me – I’d sprint to the computer, intending only to jot down a few key words, and, pages later, would find myself still huddled in front of the computer screen banging out my thoughts and feelings on the keyboard.  I often forgot to return to the half-finished chore until many hours or even a day or two later. 

Similarly, there were many times when I would spring out of bed in the middle of the night, struck by a sudden thought of a personal item of Jon’s that I might have misplaced.  Ninety-nine percent of the time, the item was right where I thought I would find it – but no matter what, I had to check.  Just like there were only a finite number of pictures of Jon in existence, he only owned a finite number of things.  He would never again buy a razor or a toothbrush.  I couldn’t just add these personal items to my collection of his things later on if I felt like it.  No, once I gave these things of Jon’s away, they were gone forever and they were never coming back.  Just like Jon, they would be but a memory.  Even if there was a chance that a sweater might still have a hint of his scent (despite being locked up in a dirty, dusty footlocker sent back from Iraq) or if there was a possibility that one of his combs might still carry a trace of his hair, I couldn’t throw it away.  I remember the look on the faces of the clerks at Bed Bath & Beyond and Crate and Barrel when I finally gathered up the strength to return some of the wedding gifts that were still sitting wrapped in boxes at our apartment.  What was I supposed to do with ten sets of beautiful Wedgewood china when throwing a fancy dinner party without my husband seemed impossible, blasphemous even?  I couldn't stand to look at the stuff - it was easier just to give it back.  Eventually, I was also able to separate myself from a few of his personal things:  prescription medications that were well beyond their expiration date, travel-sized toiletries that were still unopened, a bottle of piña colada mix that I’d been holding onto for years because Jon so loved a good piña colada.  That was a tough one.  Logical or not, I think I was afraid that if I did not take all of Jon with me, it meant I hadn’t loved him enough.  

After Jon died, I decided to withdraw from law school to become a Military Police officer at Fort Bragg where Jon had last been stationed.  Many of my friends and family were concerned that I was making a hasty decision for the wrong reasons, but I knew that it would give me something to focus on other than myself.  It would also allow me to pick up where Jon left off in Iraq.  I knew it probably sounded foolish to an outsider, but I wanted to do my part in contributing to the war effort overseas, and I wanted to see for myself the place that my husband had spent his final days alive. 

I got my wish in September 2008 when I deployed to Mahmudiyah, Iraq – an area formerly known as the “Triangle of Death” – and became a Platoon Leader in charge of forty Soldiers.  I found it very difficult when I first arrived in Iraq to forget the fact that this country was the reason my husband was no longer with me.  Only slowly but surely over time did I grow to appreciate that the contribution of thousands of Soldiers like Jon is the reason Iraq is no longer such a dangerous breeding ground for extremist militia groups.  Because of drastically improvements in infrastructure and security, we were able to focus on providing electricity and education to Iraq’s people instead of ammunition and bombs to fight terrorists.  Ironically, the last of the Army’s combat brigades left Iraq on August 18^th, 2010, the date of Jon’s birthday.  He would have been twenty-nine that year.

Iraq did not, by any means, give me all of the answers, but it did allow me to recognize the potential I still had to do some good in this world, as Jon would have wanted.  He once told me that if anything ever did happen to him, I could not allow it to destroy me and that he would want me to embrace finding love again one day.  I’m not too sure about the love part – I still have a lot of “me” to work on first, but I’m not closed off to the possibility at some point.  I’d like to think I now indulge in slightly less self-pity and a little more appreciation for the many blessings in my life.  Although I still have the possibility of a bright future, Jon was forever denied all the things that we were so looking forward to sharing together, like children, a little house, and a happily-ever-after ending to our Cinderella story.  At the funeral, Jon’s brother said that God must have a great need for Jon’s talent in his kingdom, and that, without a doubt, God will reward Jon for his selflessness, his courage, and his kindness.  I just wish that God had given us more time with him before calling him to his new mission.

These days, I continue I talk about Jon often, even to complete strangers.  It helps to recall the happy memories of our time together, though these memories are tinged with sadness because, at the end of the day, he is still gone.  I've thrown myself into memorial projects, to include establishing several scholarships in Jon’s name, contributing to the development of Survivor Outreach Services (a nation-wide program designed to help other Gold Star families), running the Army Ten Miler race  to raise money for TAPS (Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors), and, most recently, becoming involved in the American Widow Project.  I do these things because I fear more than anything what might happen if I stop and allow the gravity what happened to truly sink in.  Only now, five years later, am I finally starting to realize that I can't hide from it forever.  I feel as though everyone wants to hear the story of how “strong” I’ve been throughout this ordeal.  I haven’t felt strong.  I’ve felt very weak, in fact, at times.  I get out of bed every morning, go to work to keep myself busy, and constantly “deal” in the only way I know how.  I don’t think this makes me strong – it just makes me a survivor who has tripped over her feet and fallen several times along the way.  I’ve found that there is simply no other way to keep going other than to get up, brush off, and keep placing one foot in front of the other.  Jon’s boss told me from the very beginning that no one can walk in my shoes.   My family and friends can hold my hand and they can be there to catch me when I fall, but at the end of the day, I am the one who has to live with the memories that make me laugh out loud one second and burst into tears the next.  In the words of James Frey in his book A Million Little Pieces, “the wounds that never heal can only be mourned alone.” This can get hard, especially when I find myself consumed with thoughts during that quiet time at the end of the day.  Sometimes the only thing I can do to fill the silence is to focus on the times I know will warm my heart, like when our wedding ceremony officiate asked, "where is your sacred spot, a place you feel most connected, most at peace, or most inspired?”  Jon’s answer was very simple but very beautiful.  His answer was, "With my wife."  These three simple words remind me that although the fairy tale didn’t end the way I had hoped, I know that I am still luckier than most.  Even if just for a little while, I got my prince.  If she were to ask me again today, my answer to our wedding officiate’s question would be “With my memories of Jon.”  

"You'll never remember the moment you were born and you probably won't remember the moment you die.  But you will always remember the moment you fell in love...and the moment that your heart broke because you lost that person."

~Taryn Davis, Founder of The American Widow Project