The Letter

by Marie Tillman

  The day after I arrived in Dover, in some nondescript office on base, a very nervous military officer tried to explain to me that I needed to sign paperwork that would release Pat’s body while acknowledging that not all of him was there. I don’t know if it was the numbness or the sleep deprivation, but I couldn’t figure out what the man was trying to say. Kevin was there with me, and when the officer became so jittery that he stopped making sense, Kevin stepped in and tried to do his job for him. “Marie,” he said in a matter-of-fact tone. “Since Pat was shot in the head, pieces of his skull are missing. If you want to wait for the rest of him, it will mean staying here for at least a week while they do DNA tests.”

  Kevin and I looked at each other. This lifeless body wasn’t Pat anymore. We agreed I should sign the release forms so we could make the rest of the trip home, where everyone was waiting.

  On April 28, 2004, Kevin and I were booked on a commercial flight back to San Francisco. Kevin was wearing his dark green dress uniform, and the stiff polyester pants and jacket constricted his usually easy gait as we walked through the airport. People kept stopping him and thanking him for his service. He smiled politely, trying to hide the discomfort he felt from all the attention. Kevin and I were given first-class seats. Pat’s coffin was in the cargo hold. Once we were on board and in the air, the captain announced over the intercom that we were bringing a fallen soldier home, and asked for a moment of silence. It still—still—hadn’t sunk in that he was talking about my husband, that he was talking about Pat.

  * * *

  Pat’s memorial was held at the San Jose Municipal Rose Garden, which had also been the venue for our high school graduation. It was May 3, a day before our second wedding anniversary. Two thousand people lined the stadium, and the service was televised nationally on ESPN. John McCain spoke, as did Maria Shriver, and a host of former teammates, coaches, and friends. Steve White, a Navy SEAL who Pat and Kevin had befriended, also spoke. He explained that there’s little you can do in an ambush, short of taking the fight to the enemy, which was what Pat had done. He talked about how Pat had been awarded the Silver Star for bravery, for courageously distracting the enemy so that others serving with him might have a chance to escape. “Pat sacrificed himself so his brothers could live,” he said. This was the most we’d heard about how Pat had been killed; all we’d learned up to that point was that he had been shot in the head by the Taliban during an ambush. I barely registered any of it.

  Christine’s husband, Alex, who had been very close with Pat, spoke soon after Steve. He poured a Guinness for Pat before making a few remarks. “There have been some extremely eloquent and powerful words said today about Pat Tillman the war hero, Pat Tillman the football player, and Pat Tillman the public figure,” he said. “You know what, they’re awesome words, and they’re very, very much appreciated. But…for those of us up at the front, his close family and friends…we’ve lost our Pat.” He went on to talk about the things only those close to Pat knew, like the way he would say hello to everybody while out running, the way he laughed at his own jokes and would say, “See? I’m funny,” the way he constantly tried to improve himself and demanded 100 percent of everyone in his life. “Pat never told you what to do,” Alex continued, “but he certainly helped you find your way, even when you didn’t know you were lost.”

  I read all the memorial service speeches afterward but, truthfully, remember little from that day. I remember the thick hot air that smelled of grass and sweat, my black cotton dress clinging to me as the perspiration dripped down my back, the sound of bagpipes. I wore dark sunglasses to shield me from the invasive eyes of the crowd. Surrounded by thousands of people, I felt lost and alone. I wanted to run. I needed to get out of there. I couldn’t wait for the day to end.

  Surrounded by enormous photos of Pat on large easels, by cameras and hordes of people I didn’t know, I realized that Pat was no longer ours, his friends’ and family’s, despite Alex’s attempt to put everything in context. The media attention given to his life and death felt like a violation. Speculation about why he had done what he had and trivialization of our lives caused me to fiercely guard my privacy. I have been described as emotionally guarded, and this is pretty accurate. My trust and friendship is earned in time, not given out haphazardly. I have many friendly acquaintances, but a small select crew of solid confidants. I am often suspicious and cautious with people, and the aftermath of Pat’s death made this trait even more acute.

  Pat had become an icon, a cultural symbol. His life and death meant different things to different people, and their interpretation of him often was some reflection of themselves, or the selves they wished they were. Complete strangers mourned him, but they mourned the loss of something symbolic, while we, his friends and family, mourned the flesh-and-blood man.

  After Pat’s memorial, Kevin stayed in San Jose a few days longer than I did, and returned to our cottage in University Place after I’d started back at work. We had decided to keep the place, to keep living together, until Kevin’s commitment ended the following year. I didn’t know where I’d go, anyway, so I appreciated the time to figure things out.

  Kevin and I went about our days like two shadows. I left for work before the sun was up, then returned around seven p.m.

  “Hey, Marie,” Kevin said when I came in one night. He was spread out in his usual spot on the couch. The TV was on, but he wasn’t really watching it. He had a book perched on his knee.

  “Hey.”

  “I made tacos, if you want some.” It was his signature dish.

  “Cool, thanks.” I dropped my stuff in my room, pulled on some pajama pants, and went into the kitchen. While neither of us felt much like eating anymore, we still tried to maintain some sense of normalcy. All I wanted was to go to my room, to let down the face I put on for others and just be alone, to go to sleep. But I felt like I needed to put in some social time.

  I made myself a taco and sat curled in the big chair in front of the TV while Kevin and I watched Arrested Development together in silence. I took a few bites, then set my plate aside. When the show was over, I was relieved. I could finally go to my room.

  That’s how most weeknights went. On the weekends, I probably could have stayed in bed all day. But I knew that if I stayed in bed, Kevin would worry. He would feel like he needed to do something about it. I knew Kevin was saddled with his own grief and I didn’t think it fair to burden him with mine. Had I needed him too much, he would have gladly helped me carry the load, and that wasn’t his job. The words Pat wrote to me before he died could have easily applied to Kevin as well; he needed to be free to live his life without my anchor. I loved him, and as his brother had shown me for many years, love is about setting the other free.

  So I got out of bed, and Kevin got out of bed, each of us putting on a show for the other. A friend of Kevin’s who played for the Seattle Mariners invited us to a game once. We tried to go and enjoy the game, but as soon as we got to the stadium, we looked at each other and agreed it was a bad idea. We weren’t ready for the noise, the crowds, the stimulation. We stayed a few innings, then left. Going to the movies, too, seemed like it would be too much. But once we were out of bed, we had to do something. So we went back to the Hob Nob, ordered our omelets and coffee, and sat reading the paper, both of us on autopilot and not really wanting to be there.

  One Saturday I came home from the market and Kevin had a big smile on his face. He had gone to the store and bought a big whiteboard and an easel, which he assembled in the living room. “What is all this?” I asked.

  “We’re going to do Words of the Week,” he said. When Pat was alive, we had talked about doing Words of the Week, but we’d never gotten around to it. “So let’s pick five words from the dictionary,” Kevin continued, “write them up here, and use them as much as we can all week. Then we’ll pick five more next week.”

  It touched me to see Kevin trying so hard to bring a little light to our life. I faked my excitement for our new game and gr
abbed the dictionary off the shelf. We flipped through, trying to find our first week’s words.

  “What about ‘stymied’?” I said. “‘To thwart; stump.’”

  “Oh, that’s a good one.”

  We tried really hard to be less pathetic. But those first five Words of the Week sat on the whiteboard, unchanged, for a long time.

  * * *

  Over a month after Pat died, I got home well after dark. Kevin was waiting on the couch when I came in, and I could tell he was agitated. “You’re never going to believe this,” he said.

  Try me, I thought. I didn’t think anything could unhinge me anymore. What was left that I cared enough about to be moved by?

  “They think Pat was killed by fratricide, that our own guys killed him.” I was halfway to my room and stopped, dropping my workbag. It took a minute for me to register what he had said; then a wave of nausea came over me. I thought I was going to throw up.

  “But they told us he was killed in an enemy ambush,” I said, my mind racing back to that first day, and to Steve White’s speech at the memorial. “Why would they lie?”

  “Colonel Bailey is coming over tomorrow,” Kevin said, referring to their battalion commander. Kevin didn’t have much information. He’d been called into his commanding officer’s office that day and been told in an offhanded way, “We think that it might have been a fratricide, but we’re investigating it.” And that was all he’d been told. That didn’t leave us with much more to talk about. I went to my room and closed the door, needing time to process the news.

  When Colonel Bailey came over the next day, he wasn’t dressed in uniform but in civilian clothes. He sat with Kevin and me in our living room. He grabbed a piece of paper and did a rough diagram of what they thought might have happened. In a confusing move through a canyon, the platoon had split, he said. One ended up firing on the other. He said they were going to do an investigation, and that there would be a briefing for the family in a couple of weeks. Kevin was inwardly furious. In the time since he’d returned to Fort Lewis, he’d worked alongside guys who were responsible for his brother’s death, and no one had told him. I didn’t share Kevin’s anger at first. I was upset; it was an upsetting and confusing situation. But I gave Colonel Bailey the benefit of the doubt, accepting that they needed to complete an investigation before they knew what had happened.

  Pat’s mom, dad, brother Richard, and uncle Mike flew up to Fort Lewis for the briefing, which was held in a small conference room on base. We sat for three hours and listened to Colonel Bailey run through his PowerPoint presentation. All I kept thinking was I can’t believe they put together a PowerPoint to explain Pat’s death. It seemed so clinical and dehumanizing. And for the first time, something about Colonel Bailey’s story didn’t sit right with me. Pat’s dad, Patrick, asked a lot of difficult questions. Colonel Bailey kept trying to placate Patrick with compliments about Pat’s heroics but never really answered his questions. At the end of the meeting, we were given a written report. Nothing had been provided in advance so that we could ask more informed questions, even though Patrick had requested these materials. We left the briefing with misgivings.

  Around this time, I read that there’s a kind of grief called complicated grief, although it’s hard to imagine any grief not being complicated. Complicated grief is often caused when a death is sudden or violent, or when the grieving process is interrupted by circumstantial factors, making painful emotions severe and long lasting. With complicated grief, you have trouble accepting the death and resuming your own life. In treating complicated grief, some psychologists have found success with traumatic-grief therapy, during which patients continuously tell the story of death to confront thoughts and situations they may be avoiding, and move toward acceptance.

  Based on the information the Army had given me right after Pat died, I’d constructed the story of Pat’s death in my head—that he’d been killed in an enemy ambush—and was coming to terms with it. I wasn’t anywhere close to healed, but at least I was coming to accept that he had actually died. But if he’d died some other way, this changed everything. If what they had told me at first was wrong, maybe the whole thing was wrong. Maybe he was still alive. I went to the only story I wanted to hear. I jumped directly to fantasy and denial. Now I needed somehow to find my way back to acceptance.

  After the briefing, Pat’s family and I decided to pursue the circumstances of his death in depth, filling out information requests and receiving binders and binders of material, much of it with blacked-out text, in return. During the next weeks and months, I started slowly to reimagine Pat’s death. Part of me didn’t really want to know about the details. Pat was gone. I needed to face facts and find a way to put the pieces of my life back together.

  But another, more complex thread of my grieving process started to unwind that day, and it would take a long, long time before it was finished.

  * * *

  I don’t like attention and prefer to operate under the radar, where few people notice. Even on my wedding day—unlike most brides, who relish “their day”—I squirmed under the focus of the guests and the constant photographs. Luckily, Pat was there to absorb the spotlight, as he often did, and I happily gave it to him. Since his death, the spotlight had been hard to dodge.

  With so much attention focused on me, I felt fully exposed and violated. As a means of defense, I developed a distant, cool exterior, trying to completely mask my emotions. I didn’t want anyone to see what was going on beneath the surface. While I mostly wished for the superpower of invisibility, or the ability to take flight to avoid an uncomfortable situation, or—better yet—the ability to spontaneously combust, this mask served me well for the season of smaller memorials that followed the one at the rose garden. While I appreciated the genuine expressions of love and adoration, I hated being on display and having to suffer publicly through the most private of experiences.

  Everyone wanted to see the grieving widow, but I had taken pride in this most difficult time that I could maintain my composure and avoid a public show. My composure was also my one act of defiance. Everyone wanted me to break down, because they wanted the satisfaction of picking me back up. They wanted to feel useful. I wouldn’t give them that satisfaction. Everything else was out of my control, but this I could control.

  I quickly realized after Pat was killed that many people are uncomfortable with death. Some can handle the immediate aftermath, can maintain the proper etiquette of bringing over food and sending flowers, but few can handle the stark reality of loss. They want you to grieve an appropriate amount of time, then move on. At Pat’s memorial, someone had said to me, “You’re young, you’ll find someone else.” Another person had said, “Thankfully you had no children.” Others would respond to the fact that we were childless with pity. Most of the time people didn’t even catch the inappropriateness of their comments, but occasionally, after seeing the look on my face, they understood the error in their words. I soon realized I shouldn’t take these things personally. At such painful moments, some people unknowingly project their deepest fears onto you, the widowed.

  How different it must have been during the nineteenth century, when people properly understood mourning. Widows dressed in heavy black robes and veils, covering their swollen red eyes and thinning figures. They were allowed to mourn fully for four years, not expected to “find someone else” the day after the memorial. Today Western corporate culture dictates two weeks of bereavement. Death should be sufficiently mourned in this time; then it’s back to work. Even after September 11, one of the most devastating days in our country’s history, flags hung at half-mast at the White House for two weeks. Then, as a signal to the nation to “move on,” they were raised to full mast.

  I think it’s our fear of loss that causes people to act this way. Seeing the bereaved is a reminder that things don’t always go as planned in life. You don’t have control, and inexplicably, tragedy strikes. Most of my friends—happy and young—didn’t want to face
the reality that something could happen to them, too. Somehow, acknowledging that something can happen seems to increase the probability that it will, and you don’t want to jinx yourself.

  If people don’t avoid you, they want to do something. When people are sorry for you and don’t see an immediate way to help (there are only so many casseroles that will fit in a freezer), they write a check. So much money came in after news of Pat’s death broke that we realized we needed to figure out a place into which we could channel it. A group of family and close friends decided to start the Pat Tillman Foundation, though we didn’t really know where it would lead. Pat’s closest friends spearheaded the effort, seeing it as a way to take all the public fervor over his story and bring the focus back to what Pat meant to those who knew him. One of the first decisions was to work with ASU to start a leadership program in Pat’s name. I was involved from the beginning but didn’t have the capacity to lead any effort, let alone a nonprofit. No one involved in the foundation ever made me feel bad for not doing more. In a sense, it was also their way of doing something for me.

  My family, too, wanted to do something, especially in those early days. I remember them looking at me helplessly, wanting me to go see a therapist, to take a pill, anything to make it better. I understood where they were coming from, but it wasn’t where I was. The only person who could really get through to me was Christine. She had a way of meeting me at whatever spot I inhabited emotionally, never pushing, but also never acting as though everything was fine. It was the same way she was with her kids. At a small gathering we’d had to view Pat’s coffin before the memorial service, Christine’s three-year-old son had asked loudly why Uncle Pat wouldn’t get out of his casket. Many people might have felt embarrassed by his openness or questioned the wisdom of bringing a three-year-old to such a gathering, but Pat’s death was a huge event in all our lives, including my nephew’s life, and Christine wasn’t going to pretend like it wasn’t. And she’d never pretend with me.