It is late fall, just after Halloween. If you walk quietly down a path, or into a garage, Charlotte-sized spiders skittle toward cover like wind up children’s toys. Web strands form and reform across slim trails, between grown-close tree trunks, in doorways. They brush your face as you walk. This morning, the gentleman on the corner of County Road 38E cleared his pumpkin patch. The bright orange half rounds were rolled out, the dirt smoothed, even the vines gone.
Months ago, in the newer light of late spring, I wrote of a Marine killed in Iraq –Sergeant Nicholas R. Walsh, 1st Recon Marine, based out of Pendleton in San Diego. His mom and dad found out he’d died half a world away as they pulled into their driveway. They had just attended the high school graduation of their second son. A cake waited on the counter, balloons, streamers.
Before Nick left for Iraq, his parents bought him a super-dooper, as close to impenetrable as they could get, neck guard. They bugged him about wearing it. They pestered, nagged, and worried.
The sniper bullet that hit Nick pierced the small stripe of skin just between his helmet and the neck guard. He had turned his head to talk to a buddy, exposing the slim sliver, and a bullet ricocheted off the barrel of his gun, killing him.
Nick was a team leader; his family calls the rest of the team “Nick’s boys.” Nick’s boys came home last week. Halloween had been a beacon. Nick’s wife used it over and over with Triston, their 4 year old.“Daddy will be home at Halloween.”On Valentine’s Day, and Easter, and Saint Patrick’s Day this was hard for him to understand.“When’s Halloween again?”
In May, on the morning Triston found out his father would never come back, he said in a scrambling, make-it-all-better, magical thinking way, and “I’ll trade my Halloween costume for him back.” His baby brother, only months old, cooed.
In the last few months, a lifetime has passed for this Marine family. Halloween is gone and Nick is not home. His boys are, however, safely back at campPendleton. His parents say it gives them peace that the other boys are stateside.
People who read the other columns about Nick’s death and funeral and family ask me “How are they doing?” I too ask myself that. I check, I watch. But, truly, it is hard to know how the grieving are “doing.” I imagine a wild ride, changing sometimes from plunge to straightaway and back to plunge erratically, suddenly, constantly. I imagine dizzy, and tired, and don’t-wanna-do-this-anymore. I also imagine knowing that getting on with it anyway is the order of the day. Get up. Eat. Move forward toward nightfall. Again.
They are doing okay from the outside. We outsiders are relieved. We breathe-a-sigh when grieving folks get up in the morning, get dressed, smile at us, eat what we offer them. We are relieved when they play, go to school, watch Rockies games, and cheer for the Packers (yes, even this relieves us). We are relieved when they act as we remember them.
This time of year, if you walk somewhere quiet, spider filaments will stretch across your path. You can’t see them, but they will brush your face, your upper shoulders, your neck.Even though many others have walked the path, perhaps just minutes ago, the web is re-strung, quick, ready.
Walking grief is like this. The rest of us can’t see what this family, or any grieving family, is moving into minute by minute, day by day. We can’t feel the loss restring itself, spin itself, hang itself across their paths, differently and unexpected each time – all day, all night.
