Remembering Goodbye
I’ve been home for four days, and already I am off again – to Texas. The alarm wakes me at 4:00 am today, and I get up to catch my 7:00 flight to Dallas. Traffic is dense on the highway, but I make it to the airport just in time to realize that my flight leaves from terminal three.
Terminal three is the very place where I said goodbye to my husband as he left for Iraq some five months ago. Military families are allowed to enter through security to say their goodbyes. It’s a kind gesture, but really just delays the inevitable. Five months ago, I sat in a chair next to my husband, staring at the gate where I would watch him walk away. I could not find tears, but my heart beat against my chest, my pulse thrumming in my ears, my stomach sick with fear of what might happen to my husband in Iraq; dreading a year without my love. I wanted to be strong and brave, to be a supportive wife, so the tears flowed only after the last kiss goodbye. I sobbed as I walked away. I now know that my husband did too. We tried to be strong for each other. We still do.
Today as I stand in the place where we said goodbye, my stomach turns and I feel like I’ll be sick, the emotion of that day filling me again. I make it through security just fine; no tears come. I’ve learned to keep those at bay by now, in public anyway.
I’m doing just fine keeping the tears under wraps until I see them: a man in uniform bending forward in his chair under the weight of this heavy day, and a woman, her hand on his head, and then his neck, her head leaned close to his. She’s wearing dark sunglasses and I know exactly why. I remember so well the pain of those last moments, the fear. I remember the sense that my husband and I were beginning something that goes against all natural instinct, but that joins me with millions of women in history who have sent their lovers to war. I somehow found strength in this, and still do. I wait until the uniformed man boards the flight, and then catch the woman as she walks away. Nothing I say will take away her heartache. My throat feels like I swallowed a golf ball as I say to the woman that I’ve been where she is. That first day is the hardest. It gets less painful, but it never gets easy.
Having just been in Iraq, I believe with all of me that we cannot leave there. But I ache with the pain that us being there causes for people who never asked for war. And though I hope and believe that the sacrifices being made will birth at least some semblance of peace and freedom for families in Iraq, I can’t help but hate the very fact of war and what it does to our families.
There is a selfish part of me that says we should end it now. Bring our men home. Bring my husband home to me. We take care of our own. Let them sort it out. This is their problem. Not mine; not ours. Part of me wants more than anything for this to end no matter what the cost to the Iraqi people. But there is another part of me that believes that good must fight against evil, that strong must protect weak, and that our honor is worth more than my happiness.
