Moving on with life

So with the end of our year in base housing creeping closer to us, I finally bit the bullet and bought a house in Colorado Springs. It's a very nice house with ALMOST everything I could ask for.... 4 bedrooms, tri-level, wood burning fireplace, huge-to-me backyard, and the icing on the cake... 2200 square feet.

I met the neighbors the other day. To the right of me, a nice family with teenage boys and a cute little 18 month old girl. To the left of me, an older gentleman and his wife with grownup chidren and adorable little grandchidren. And behind me a retired military couple with SEVEN girls ranging in age from 6 to 22. In talking with each neighbor respectively I learned that the fence line is the ORIGINAL fence, so that must go this spring and be replaced. Also found out that the house has been empty for 3 years.... wow... had I known that I would have countered the counter the sellers gave me.

And then - reality check with the military and my shipment of household goods. After calling yesterday to find out where my goods were (they were supposed to be delivered on Friday), I was told by the moving company that per the military everything was put into storage on 2 November. WTF. So I call the Colorado Springs military movers and was told that because my shipment was a bluebark shipment and it requires delicacy and was a "sensitive" matter, that when my stuff arrived in the Springs on the 2nd that instead of calling me to schedue a delivery, they called the casulity officer in the area. When they were unable to get ahold of the casuality officer, they put my stuff in storage.

Excuse me? So because my husband died for his country, you wont deal with ME directly?? You have to play 3rd party with me and have a casuality officer contact me to schedule delivery?? I realize they don't know me, and don't know I've been living this life from hell for the last 11 months, but seriously now.... I'm not some wilting rose ready to fall apart at the slightest touch. So because they didn't want to deal with me specifically because of the "sensitive" nature of the move, I'm shit out luck without my stuff until Thursday, November 11th. Thanks for fucking me over once more United States Air Force. So I hung up on the SSgt after telling her that, and called my casuality officer at EAFB who assure me that this was NOT the way it was supposed to happen and she would deal with it to the best of her abilities.

So after ignoring their call 3 times while venting to a friend I called them back. Shockingly enough, after I told them to not bother the shipping company, they called the shipping company and managed to get them to deliver my stuff on Monday.

The icing on my cake of life ........... had I not called the moving company to find out what was going on and been directed to the military, I would still be waiting for my stuff for longer because the casuality officer had still not returned the movers phone call and my household goods would have remained in storage for a longer period of time.

Surviving Death

   We do not recover from the death of a loved one. In fact, we never recover from that death in the same way we recover from an illness or broken limb. It will always be a part of us—always—and to suggest otherwise is unrealistically and harshly to imply that we somehow “get over” the feelings about the event or stop experiencing painful reminiscences of the loved one or the death. A much more accurate metaphor is represented in the old Carole King song “Tapestry.”

    

    My life has been a tapestry of rich and royal hue
    An everlasting vision of the everchanging view
    A wondrous woven magic in bits of blue and gold
    A tapestry to feel and see, impossible to hold.

    In fact our lives are “tapestries,” and the death of a loved one is a ripping, gaping, bleeding hole in the very midst of that tapestry of our life. How, then, is the tapestry rewoven? It does not, with the mere passage of time, magically pull itself back together. Rather, it is rewoven only with the initiative, energy, and strength of the survivor reaching in and grasping the torn ends of threads, painfully pulling them back and tying them together. And it is rewoven only with those persons around the survivor cutting threads from their own tapestries and bringing them to the survivor, with love and support and caring and tears and strength, helping to further tie the threads and fill in the gaping hole.

    So, eventually, the tapestry is rewoven. But that “glitch” is always there, the roughness of that reweaving is, and always will be, apparent. In fact it may be twenty years from now, as the survivor reviews the tapestry of his or her life, or is in a particular setting, or hears a song on the radio, or remembers a special day of the month, that the rewoven seam is seen and felt again, and the survivor remembers and cries, or feels sad, or is touched by the love and caring expressed by those whose threads are apparent there—and that is perfectly normal. We do not recover from a death, but when we allow others to help, we can reweave our tapestry.

— Charles Meyer, in Surviving Death.

The Scarlett Letter

She had wandered, without rule or guidance, into a moral wilderness.  Her intellect and heart had their home, as it were, in desert places, where she roamed as freely as the wild Indian in his woods.  The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread.  Shame, Despair, Solitude!  These had been her teachers - stern and wild ones - and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss. 

~Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, Chapter XVIII "A Flood of Sunshine"

Widowhood, much like the Scarlet letter, is a very solitude path that one walks until they come upon another widow, and even then not every death is the same. People try to understand your pain, going home to their loved ones at night and expressing their love to their significant others hoping that the life of their friend doesn't become their own, a very real nightmare that threatens every military family. Other people go out of their way to ignore you - unsure what to say for fear of upsetting the widow - and then talk about your pain and your life behind your back with their friends. Then there are the people who listen to those who talk about you and decide to ask the widow the questions that bug them, apologizing at the same time if they upset you.

11 months ago after being notified by my husband's command of his suicide I opted to remain on base for a sence of normalcy for my children's sake. Their life had gone through the spin cycle in the dryer - flipped upside down and tumbled around until they didn't know what side was up. I kept the kids in the school that they knew with the friends that they loved, although I did notify the school counselors of what had happened. My son ended up entering counseling with a child psychiatrist in Rapid City, and my daughter was coping with the help of her school counselor.

Summer break was quickly approaching and I had scheduled vacations and trips the entire time, thinking it was best to remain busy so we would not regress with the children and the progress they had made. Staying at (h)ellsworth through the summer made more sense as I had my friends who I could rely on to pet sit for me, and I figured I would begin the home search before school started.

Needless to say my decision to stay was the talk of the town, sorta speak. My friends were bombarded with questions about why I was staying, why I was going into work, why I was keeping the truck that my husband shot himself in, and how I seemed to not be affected by what happened. I've never been one to care about what people think of me and I often, if not all the time, don't hold back or think before I speak.

I prefer surrounding myself with people who are like me, choose to be open with their thoughts and words, and not hide behind excuses. I prefer being asked questions to my face instead of having people talk about me behind my backs, because it will get back to me - shocking isn't it?

So to those who have the courage and decency to ask me questions directly, Thank you. 

To those of you who hide your questions and choose to talk about me behind my back, Fuck you. You're really not worth my time to worry about. I don't care what you say or assume about my life. You'll never know the pain that hides behind the mask and the day you do is not a day I would wish on my worst enemy.

The day our world crashed and burned

"On behalf of the Air Force and the United States of America we would like to extend our most heartfelt condolenses."

 With that one sentence, life as I had known it the last 8 years had come crashing down into a pile of fiery rubish. I was no longer a military spouse, but now a military widow trying to rebuild a life from the ashes surrounding mine and my children's lives. I should have known when pulling my car into our driveway with USAF Officers waiting for me while wearing their dress blues that this was not going to be a pleasant experience, waiting patiently for me while I stared at them from the safety of my vehicle, and asking if we could go inside when I finally exited. My husband hadn't shown up for his shift the night before and no one had been able to reach him on his cell phone despite numerous attempts and pleading voicemails to return our calls.

"The body of your husband, SSgt Matthew Peterson, was found earlier today with a self inflected gun shot wound to the head."

I remember screaming, crying, and yelling at the Chaplin and my husand's squadron Commander that he wouldn't do that... not my husband... he loved us too much, loved his parents and his sisters... he wouldn't do that! We didn't even own a gun in the house. Were they sure it was my husband? My Matt?

"Is there anyone we can call who can be here with you?"

All I knew is I wanted to be alone; however, they wouldn't leave without someone being there with me, to watch me, to support me during this time. In the military, moving around as much as we do, our friends become our families as our biological ones are often hundreds of miles away. In my case, thousands of miles away in Alaska. I turned to the one person I knew I could get ahold of.... Miriam, who rushed home from a shopping trip in town to be with me. All I could think of is how this was a nightmare... this couldn't be happening to me... to my children... oh my god... How was I going to break this to his parents, older sister and his TWIN sister?? Their only son and brother ripped from their lives at the young age of 30.

The rest of the day was a flurry of activity that I numbly nodded my way through - all cried out - as the Pennington County Sheriffs spoke with me, the Casulty Officers briefly went through all the things I would receive (life insurance - what a major relief), and a visit from the local suicide survivors group. Sleep would become a sparse commodity...only visiting after being induced by drugs prescribed to me by my PCM. Thanksgiving dinner planning would be substituted with memorial and funeral planning, only to be "celebrated" by visiting a friend's house for a turkey dinner.

At the age of 29, I shouldn't have to be preparing for my husband's funeral....picking out his urn, the memory book, preparing an obituary for the local newspaper, having to view my husband's body in the casket a day before his military honors funeral. Our children shouldn't be exposed to death at their young ages, having to say goodbye to a dad they had only known for 8 short years, many of which were spent without him due to deployments. A week before Thanksgiving and instead of picking up a frozen Butterball turkey, I was picking up his ashes from the funeral home and bringing him home with me in a small wooden box.

Unlike other military widows, my husband wasn't taken from our family by an act of war in a foriegn country. He was ripped from us by a conscious decision made on his behalf. A part of a grusome and frightening statistic that was, and still is, a growing concern amongst the military population - Suicide.  Last year the numbers of active duty service members who committed suicide exceeded the amount of service members killed in action. At our base, my husband was one of four men who had committed suicide in that year, although 25 had suicidal thoughts or attempted suicide unsuccessful.

This is our life as we know it now. A widowed 29 year old raising 2 kids without their father, muddling our way through as best we can without the husband and father we relied on more than he knew. We will continue to slowly climb our way out of this black hole that swallowed us... we may stumble and fall, often times more than we would like, but we will emerge one day as better people for the trials and tribulations that we faced all the while knowing that our rock is smiling down on us from Heaven and watching over us.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5s2zeNIwd4