Those left behind
War widows find ways to cope, but there's really no cure for the pain
Deb Kiser knew something was terribly wrong--felt it in her gut and in her heart--hours before she would receive the official word. The fear was so strong that she ran from it early in the morning on June 24."I knew that the notification officer was not supposed to come before 8 a.m. I knew something bad happened," she says. "So I left. I wandered every stupid aisle in Wal-Mart."
When Diane Rooney saw two officers in Class A uniforms step onto her porch, she made a futile attempt to silence the messengers of death. She tried to slam the door in their faces.
Amanda Parkerson didn't want any of the details about her husband's death when the casualty assistance calls officer came to her door. "That's too much to take from someone who didn't know my husband," she says. She'll wait until his unit returns and she can hear the story from his friends.
Lisa Vance was afraid that on a bad day, a comforting look from an acquaintance would send her into uncontrollable tears; on a good day, a smile on her own face would cause whispers that she wasn't grieving properly. She largely stayed out of sight.
Body count. As tragic as an injury in the line of duty can be, it is not the ultimate sacrifice. So far, about 1,200 soldiers have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to the Department of Defense, just about half of them were married. The department does not have figures on the number of children who have lost a parent. Every military spouse knows what it means when, one somber day, there's a soldier at the door. News of a death is delivered in person; of an injury, over the telephone. So for as long as a loved one is deployed, they dread the knock more than the ring.
The military, initially criticized for not being prepared to support and counsel survivors, has taken steps to update the care, counseling, and benefits available to spouses and children.
For Kiser, the military system worked well. Even so, it wasn't enough to help the stunned family make the shift to a single-parent household. For that, the people of the Wisconsin towns of Cleveland and Sheboygan stepped in with an overwhelmingly helping hand.
Kiser and her children, Ali, 13, and Mark, 11, live in Cleveland, a 2-square-mile town of 1,300 on Lake Michigan in rural Wisconsin. Deb and Chuck, a staff sergeant, met while both were in the service stationed in Italy 17 years ago. He joined the Army Reserve after 14 years in the Navy and Navy Reserve. She knew what to expect from the military.
"My CAO [casualty assistance officer] was here all the time. I didn't open my own mail for a good eight weeks. He took care of everything. He monitored all the funeral stuff, was my escort through the funeral. He made appointments with the VA, Social Security. He would fill out forms for me and tell me where to sign," she says.
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