Well over a decade has passed since the colonel and the company chaplain arrived on my doorstep to deliver their message. Though the words were started, memorized and prescribed by protocol, it was as if I was the first person to ever hear them.
"The Secretary of the Army has asked me to express his deep regret."
Years have passed and the tumultuous feelings accompanying the notification of a soldier's death have been put to rest. Time is kind to the heart and the raw horror of disbelief no longer pries my eyes open in the morning.
The notification is repeated often, however, and the nightmare begins anew for someone else. On the evening news or the unfurled pages of a morning paper, you learn that sadness has found another home. A training accident, a helicopter crash, a roadside bombing and another colonel, another chaplain, rings another door bell.
Those first few days blend together in a series of mental snapshots - images that will, in time, become a remembered mosaic of desperate moments. A Casualty Assistance Officer, that blessed combination of softness and steel, shepherds the survivor through decisions, arrangements and paperwork. People from the service member's unit arrive with generosity in its many disguises: sympathy, potato salad, offers of help.
Later, after days without eating and nights without sleep, the time comes to say goodbye. The ceremonial 21-gun salute, seven rifles fired three times each, feels like real bullets ringing through the person left behind. The haunting notes of taps from a lone bugle will nearly bring you to your knees.
You look into the face of the soldier who hands you the tri-cornered, folded American flag. He might be young, eyes wide with the reality of this ceremony, where he has come to understand that warriors die doing their jobs. He might be old, eyes heavy from seeing so many years, so many funerals. You finger the gold star on your collar and are reminded that many have gone before, many will follow.
After the service, car doors slam and relatives leave. You close the front door to your house and listen to the overwhelming silence.
The year of firsts begins then. First birthdays and holidays are the worst. Some days are met with fond regret, others with memories of the sorry multitude of past disappointments. Husbands and wives are not always kind to each other. When the colonel and the chaplain arrived, they stole your chance to ever take back any of those harsh words. They hijacked all your might-have-beens.
The past of "we" becomes the future of "I." I is a letter with only one leg and balance is difficult.
Grief is not a straight-line journey. There are detours and dead ends, potholes and construction zones. The strangest things will take you by surprise: someone's voice, a whiff of after shave, is it him? And then you remember.
Eventually, you can open an old photo album and see a familiar face, frozen in time. He will always be that age, while you continue to soften into the folds of increasing age. Did it really happen so long ago? If he saw you now, would he recognize who you are?
The morning paper arrives, proving that the world kept turning after all. The face and the uniforms have changed, but the news is still the same.
Peggy Sanders of Holiday was a military spouse for 16 years. Her husband, U.S. Army Sgt. 1st Class Murray Elson, was killed in 1990. Guest columnists write their own views on subjects they choose, which do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.
