Turning again to life

It took me a couple of seconds to figure out the message. I opened an email that gave the contact information from someone in Springfield, Pennsylvania, who wanted to talk to me about honoring my “late husband” on Memorial Day. Larry, raised in Missouri, had no connection to Pennsylvania, so of course, they meant my first late husband. 

When I called the young member of the American Legion (the age of Samantha and a veteran of the Iraq War), we had a pleasant conversation about an event held every Memorial Day, in Springfield Township of Delaware County, a suburb 10 miles west of Philadelphia, to honor residents who had been Killed in Action while in military service. They focus on one veteran each year, and he told me Bill was the last on their list. They had been trying to locate us for a number of years. The internet has an amazing amount of personal information, and it was through my connection with Olympia First UMC and Samantha’s connection with the Olympia Family Theatre that they tracked us down to ask our permission and invite us to attend.

More than twenty years ago another surprising contact came when a young woman in a history class in a neighboring high school was assigned Capt. William G. Chandler as a research assignment. Her teacher, also a veteran of the Viet Nam conflict, wanted his students to learn about those who had served in that war. In answering her questions, I wanted to be sure she understood that war has a high cost, and is not a glamorous adventure. I shared some of Bill’s writing, expressing his doubts about returning to combat in the summer of 1972. My caller this week had seen what I has sent before, and wasn’t sure we would be willing to participate. 

To honor Bill’s life has been something I have always tried to do—by loving, nurturing, providing for and protecting his daughters—by offering unconditional love and acceptance to  his grandsons, helping them grow into honorable, peace-loving men — by being fierce and courageous as needed —by standing up for justice. I will be going to Springfield in May, as I believe at least one of his daughters, his grandsons, and his sister will be too. How little those who sacrificed so much have been remembered over these last fifty years. How good, and hard, it will be to see him honored.

Looking through the few mementos I have from our four years of marriage, gazing at the pictures in his High School yearbook, wondering how his life would have played out, what we would be like after 50 years of marriage, there is so much missing, and the grief is still there for what I lost, what might have been. Yet the same things have always  sustained me. I was loved. His children were cherished. We laughed. We dreamed. We were so young.

In John Pavlovitz’s writing about his grief over his father’s death, applying what he has learned over four years, he gives me this:

 “Death has interrupted your plans, severed your relationships, and rewritten the script for you. This is the cost of sharing your life with someone worth missing.” 

And yet—

Always in sight, I have kept a framed print with words of Thomas Gray, that I connect with my life after loss, my commitment connected to Bill’s brave and noble sacrifice, as if he were speaking to me from across the chasm of death

If I should die and leave you here alone,

be not like others sore undone, 

who keep long vigils by the silent dust and weep.

For my sake, turn again to life and smile

nerving thy heart and trembling hand 

to do something to comfort weaker hearts than thine.

Complete these dear unfinished tasks of mine 

and I, perchance, may therein comfort you.

Now. Again. I am learning to turn to life. I am learning to smile.