They are the entire evidentiary record of a person she is related to and does not remember.
Take them down and she does not become less sad.
She becomes less sure the person existed.
I did not manage those five years well.
I want that written down plainly, because there is a version of this story where I am the vigilant father who caught it, and that version is a lie.
I went back to work eight weeks after my wife’s funeral because the alternative was staying in the house.
I was in command of a battalion two years later, which meant seventy-hour weeks and a phone that did not go off, and I told myself the whole time that providing stability was the same thing as providing presence.
Samantha moved from Pueblo to Colorado Springs in the second year.
She has never once framed that as a sacrifice and it obviously was one.
And I was, by year four, extremely lonely in a way I had never admitted to a single human being — not to my sister, not to a chaplain, not to the behavioral health people whose services I have since recommended to eleven soldiers under my command and never once used myself.
There is one night from that summer that I have to put in here, because everything at the end of this depends on it.
Rebecca died at 4:20 in the afternoon on a Tuesday in July at Memorial Hospital Central.
Samantha had brought Hannah in that morning because we had all understood, by then, what the day was.
A four-year-old cannot be in the room.
That is not a rule; it is simply what the room was.
So Samantha had her in a family area down the hall with a bag of Goldfish crackers and a tablet, for a little under three hours.
Afterward, I came out and walked down that corridor, and my sister stood up and I shook my head, and she put her hand over her mouth and sat back down.
And I picked up my daughter and carried her out to a bench in a small courtyard off the second floor, because I could not do it in a building.
She had been told, three days earlier, that Mommy was very sick and was not going to get better.
She had absorbed that the way a four-year-old absorbs anything, which is partially and in the wrong order.
I told her that her mother had died.
I said the word, because a chaplain had told me to say the word, and it is the single best piece of advice anybody gave me that summer.
She asked whether Mommy was coming to the house.
I said no.
She asked whether she was coming tomorrow.
I said no, sweetheart, she’s not coming any more, not tomorrow and not any day, and that is going to be true forever and it is the saddest thing that has ever happened to us.
And she cried — not the way adults cry, in a huge, bewildered, physical way, the way small children cry when they are hurt — and she said, over and over, into my shirt, “But who’s going to be with me?”
Not where has she gone. Not why.
Who’s going to be with me.
That is the entire question a four-year-old has about death, and I have thought about it for years, and I have come to believe it is also the entire question everybody has and that we simply learn to dress it up.
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