The Letter

by Marie Tillman

  Other than with Christine, I often held my feelings close, even with friends and family. I felt disconnected from everyone, like I was isolated on an island of grief. People couldn’t read what was going on, so they often made remarks and acted in a manner that was so out of line with my internal emotional terrain it only made me feel more alone. But I acted fine to gain the freedom I needed to mourn in my own way. I acted fine to break free from the stifling embraces and well-meaning but misguided advice. I acted fine and went through the motions of my life.

  For the most part, that life was dark and sleepy, with a consistent mist that hung over everything. Some weekend mornings when I would wake up with the hours of the day stretching ahead of me, I would put on my running shoes and start wandering the damp streets by our house. On these mornings, I didn’t have the energy to be with Kevin but didn’t want to hole up in my room, either. I would wander this way for hours, wrapped in the haze, moving down the long trail that followed the shoreline. The energy required to move my legs dissipated the spinning in my brain. But I couldn’t get out of my head long enough to find peace or clarity. The grief hung all around me like a thick blanket, insulating me from the rest of the world. My shoulders sagged under its weight. I welcomed this feeling. It comforted me and became the one consistent thing in my life, my steady companion. I embraced it, dove deep into the murky waters of sorrow, and swam around.

  Chapter Four

  Several months after Pat died, I checked my calendar in the morning and saw I had completely forgotten about a doctor’s appointment I’d made for my annual checkup.

  I had been to the doctor’s office only once before, and double-checked the address before I left. When I arrived, I settled into a cramped seat in the tiny waiting room at the top of the stairs, noticing a disproportionate amount of expectant mothers. Many, haggard but happy, were juggling a toddler and a diaper bag.

  When I’d been there before, the previous winter, it was because I was trying to get pregnant.

  Pat and I both wanted kids, and if it had been up to him, we would have started a family right after we got married. We weren’t around kids all that much, but Pat loved them. When he played for the Cardinals, he’d made a great effort to come to San Jose for the birth of Christine and Alex’s firstborn, even though he’d had only a small window between his practice commitments. He loved signing autographs for kids after games and always took time to talk to them and answer their funny questions. Also, Pat’s parents had been young when they had him, and he always liked the idea of being a young dad. And our lifestyle was very settled. We’d been together a long time, and though we were still in our twenties, we weren’t out partying every night; we were home cooking dinner and watching movies. But at the time we got married, Pat had just entered the military. I knew those obligations would take him away much of the time, and I couldn’t see being in a new place with a newborn, without him, without family, without good friends. I knew early motherhood was hard, and didn’t want to make it even harder by adding isolation to the mix. So I said we should wait, and Pat agreed.

  A year and a half after that conversation, Pat and I stole away for a long weekend to the Oregon coast. We spent a night in the sleepy town of Astoria, then another in Cannon Beach. The beach itself was as wide as a football field, and an enormous rock formation jutted out from the surf, attracting so many seagulls that often the rock was as much white as gray. Though Pat still had over a year left in his commitment to the military, the end was in sight. We’d gotten over the hump. After Afghanistan, there would be one more deployment, and then the remainder of his service would be stateside as they processed him out. Pat was starting to look ahead to football, and we strategized how he could spend the last few months of his service getting conditioned to play again. We also renewed our discussion about starting a family. Even if I got pregnant right away, there would be only a limited time when Pat wouldn’t be around once a baby was born—and even then, he would be close, not off in a foreign war zone. What better place than this magical beach to start a family?

  But I didn’t get pregnant at the beach, or during the next month. After only two months of trying, I was anxious about our lack of success. The window before Pat would deploy again was closing, and no amount of cycle monitoring and counting had worked. So I’d scheduled an appointment with a doctor who might help or at least put my mind at ease.

  Now I laughed at my former self, who thought she could control so much, who thought she could skillfully schedule a birth to correspond with a small window of time between Pat’s multiple deployments. Everything had changed. No baby, no pregnancy, no husband, no control.

  After I learned Pat had been killed, there was still a chance—though remote—that I might be pregnant. When I got my period not long after Pat’s memorial service, I was disappointed, but too overwhelmed by everything else to really process it. Well, there’s that, I had thought.

  The doctor’s assistant called me in, and I went through the motions of the exam. When my doctor was through, she asked me how I was doing. It’s a typical question from a doctor to a patient. But as I started to give my automatic answer of “Fine,” tears welled up in my eyes. A knot formed in my throat and I couldn’t speak. Grasping at the flimsy paper gown wrapped around me, I felt completely vulnerable. For months, I had successfully guarded myself, but here I was, physically and emotionally exposed. Once unleashed, the raw emotion flew out of me. I shook, sobbing uncontrollably. I should be able to control myself better, I thought, humiliated.

  My doctor looked at me sympathetically as I quickly brushed away the tears and struggled to put my clothes on. She pulled a small prescription pad out of her coat pocket and scribbled something on it. Then she handed it over and said, “Here—this may help.” It was a prescription for the antidepressant Wellbutrin. I shoved it into my pocket, thanked her, and left.

  On the drive home through the rain-soaked streets, as I got past my initial embarrassment for breaking down, I suddenly felt angry. I barely knew this doctor; I hadn’t seen her in over a year. She knew I had recently lost my husband, but we’d barely spoken during the exam, and because I broke down in her office, she offered me an antidepressant, as if my display of emotion was something I should put an end to through any means possible. She didn’t ask any questions other than “How are you doing?” And based on my response, she decided I clearly needed to be medicated.

  I was no stranger to blue moods. Through my adolescence and early twenties, I lived stretches of time masking a low-grade, steady sense of insecurity and gloom. But I’d always found a way to break free. Because of this kinship to melancholy, I worried when Pat was killed that I would fall into a deep hole and never find my way out, but in the months that had passed, that hadn’t happened. I was grieving, and this doctor wanted to throw medication at me to make it go away, as if it could. In a way, it felt like the same societal message: two weeks to grieve, then it’s back to work.

  As views of the narrows came into sight, framed at every angle by pine trees or craftsman houses, my thoughts continued, clearer than they’d been in months. I saw that the reason I’d been able to control my emotions for so long was that I’d been numb. The coma of sudden loss had lulled me into a false sense of control. Now, driving the side streets back home, I knew the numbness was gone. Grief, I then realized, is not something to be contained. You can try to lock it away, but it finds its way through the cracks and holes in our lives.

  I was depressed, but my husband had just been killed and it felt like the proper emotion. I wanted to feel this pain deeply, purely. I knew medication was an option if things became unbearable. But for the moment, I could bear it and wanted to work through the pain in my own way. I just needed time and space to sort through all that had happened, not just over the past few months since Pat had died but in the time before.

  * * *

  It was only four years earlier, the fall of 2001, when Kevin had come to Phoenix for the weekend to see Pat play and visit
a few friends. A small crew had assembled at our place after the game and sat chatting and enjoying drinks around the fire pit outside. After a couple of hours, I went to bed but lay awake listening to the low rumble of chatter, punctuated by an occasional laugh, coming from the backyard. The conversation quickly flowed from the game to the recent events on September 11. It was still fresh in everyone’s mind, and they debated the conflicting stories already coming out of the tragedy. I was almost asleep when Pat climbed into bed. I folded into him and lay my head on his chest. A few minutes passed but I could tell his mind was still turning from the conversation outside.

  “What if I joined the Army?” he said into the darkness.

  I opened my eyes and saw the outline of his face staring up at the ceiling.

  “Are you serious?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, maybe,” he replied.

  The words that passed between us hung in the air, then sunk slowly in. We knew there was more to talk about, but that was it for the night. The seed was planted in our minds.

  We had both been affected by the events of September 11. It was horrible; how could we not have been? I’d gone on a run that morning before turning on the radio or television, and when I got back, Pat was watching the news unfold. Kevin had called and woken him up to tell him to turn on the television. I sat watching with Pat for a little while, stunned by the images but still not completely sure what was going on. Only later, when I was watching with my colleagues at work, did it become clear it was a terrorist attack. Pat watched alone for a while once I went to work, then left to watch reports from the Cardinals’ training facility.

  That night, we kept following events on the news. We didn’t talk about it that much, just watched. While our sadness was the same, we responded to different images. I couldn’t get the picture of the panicked and grief-stricken families out of my head, the missing-person flyers and the pleas for help. Pat reacted more to the symbolism of the act, to the fact that our country had been attacked. A few days later, Pat gave an interview to NFL Films. “I play football,” he said, “and it just seems so—Goddamn, it is unimportant compared to everything that has taken place. I feel guilty even having the damn interview. My grandfather was at Pearl Harbor, a lot of my family has gone and fought in wars, and I really haven’t done a damn thing. I think of this—this kind of sounds tacky, but I’ve always thought about Pearl Harbor, and the people and the boats and the bombs kind of coming down, and what they were going through, their screaming and the passion they exuded and how they lost their lives. I think of stuff like that. I imagine I’ll probably have a few other things to think about now, maybe a fireman running up those stairs.”

  Pat felt like we were living through an important part of history. Life, he saw, was about much more than what was immediately in front of us. He had always loved history and spent a lot of time reading about Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln, and other great leaders. Up until that point in our lives, not much had happened in the world that had had the power to shake us up and make us feel called to action. Now Pat did feel called to act. The need to protect and defend was physical to him. Chivalry was embedded in his DNA, evident in the way he’d rush to defend his brothers or his friends, in the way he kindly treated women, in the way he’d internalized stories his mother had told him about the battles of Gettysburg and Bull Run. There are people who don’t respond strongly to words like “honor,” but Pat did. Those five small letters strung together meant the world to him.

  Weeks went by. Pat sustained an ankle injury and focused himself on getting healthy and finishing out the season. We spent a quiet Christmas in Phoenix, just the two of us, the conversation from October tucked away. Even if he’d wanted to enlist September 12, he never would have broken his NFL contract. When the season ended, Pat tried to relax into a few months of off time. He visibly struggled with too much leisure time. Each off-season, he tried to be productive, constantly working to keep his mind and body moving. This off-season was a little different, though; our wedding was only a couple of months away and we spent a lot of time in San Jose, attending to details. All the while, Pat wrestled with the idea of joining the Army. He learned that if he joined the Rangers, he could choose where he wanted to be based, and that Fort Lewis, outside Seattle, was one of those choices. I watched and served as a sounding board as he researched different options, talked to people who had served, and tried to set a plan in place for a path he was instinctively drawn to.

  It wasn’t really logical for him to join; it was emotional. He felt a larger calling, and never one to shy away from a challenge or let convention get in his way, he ultimately decided this was the path he wanted to take. He felt bad that our wedding was only months away, and told me that if I didn’t think it was appropriate to get married right then, he’d understand. I didn’t want to postpone the wedding, but I struggled with what this would mean for our lives. I worried about his safety, of course, but at that time I also didn’t really think Pat could get hurt or killed. He was smart; he was strong; he’d figure out a way to get through okay. Mainly, I feared missing his company. We’d spent four years apart during college, and I didn’t want to go back to that. I loved our quiet little life in Phoenix. I hated when he was gone in the summer at training camp, and long deployments when we’d be away from each other were not what I wanted. We both wanted to start a family as soon as possible, and his enlisting would interfere with that plan. In some of my angry moments, I felt he was being selfish, and told him so. But deep down, I knew it was I who was being selfish.

  I hated guns, violence, and war and had always been perplexed by the need for it all. Was fighting just human nature? Was this what we did as people—tried to conquer each other? I didn’t completely get it, but still I always admired people who enlisted. I couldn’t imagine what it would take for me to do so myself. But that wasn’t the point. If Pat had come to me one day and said that he wanted us to join the peace corps, or that he wanted to open a creperie, I would have taken him seriously. I would have said, “Okay, let’s talk it through,” because that’s what our relationship was like.

  The only cost would be pushing the pause button for the three years of his enlistment. These years would be only a blip on a long life together. I could imagine us being old, sitting on our rockers, reminiscing: “Remember when you were in the military? That was crazy!” Three years, and then it would be on to the next adventure, maybe one of my choosing.

  One Sunday, I was busy Googling away when Pat walked into our home office. He came up behind me, put his hands on the back of the chair, and leaned down to see what I was working on. I had been researching Seattle all morning, getting into the spirit of adventure and excitement a move would bring.

  “What are you up to?” he asked.

  “Just doing a little research about Seattle,” I said. “It’s so beautiful there, all the water and trees. It would be a nice change of pace from the desert.”

  “So what do you think? Could we make it work for a couple of years?” he asked hesitantly.

  I knew he was asking much more than if I could handle relocating for a period of time. We had talked through all the pros and cons of his enlistment, but really the items on the lists didn’t matter. The decision to join the Army wasn’t about all that. It was about Pat’s hearing that voice inside, his internal compass pointing him in a different direction, urging him to make a change. It was that part of his character that compelled him to dedicate his life to something more meaningful. It was a part of him, a part I loved. I knew by asking him not to go I would be asking him to be someone he wasn’t, and that was something I could never do.

  “I think we could really be happy up there,” I said.

  He kissed the top of my head and left me to my research.

  * * *

  When Pat called Kevin to let him know, both of us knew Kevin would join, too. He was playing minor-league baseball but struggling because of a persistent injury, and the military was something he had talked
about in the past. He just needed that final push. Truth be told, I worried less about Pat’s safety in the military than Kevin’s. I knew Pat would never be the same if something happened to Kevin.

  Kevin, Pat, and I went to a recruiting office in a strip mall in Mesa. Kevin and I pretended to be a married couple while Pat stood in the background, trying not to attract attention to himself in case anyone recognized him. Army posters dotted the walls, and the recruiter we spoke with was as nondescript as the office he worked in. He took one look at Kevin—young, athletic, clean-cut—and started selling us hard. And though I was completely aware of the job he was trained to do, he must have done it well, because I started feeling more positive about the whole thing. He confirmed that Rangers could choose where they would be based, and that Rangers could serve for three years instead of four. Kevin, Pat, and I went out for lunch afterward to discuss the recruiter’s suggestions and what they were going to do. Kevin and Pat were both pretty excited about the Rangers. Soon after, they told the recruiter they were interested, and we started thinking about a move to Fort Lewis.

  Basic training would start just six weeks after our wedding. It was official. We were doing this. Kevin, Pat, and I made a pact to keep the news secret until after the wedding. We knew the reaction from friends and family would be mixed, and we wanted to keep the day about the celebration of Pat’s and my life together.

  Keeping a secret of that magnitude wasn’t easy. I was on edge, and though never the type of bride to care much about details like favors and flowers, I cared even less knowing how insignificant all that was compared to what I was hiding. We got a lot of questions the weekend of the wedding about Pat’s plans. He was a free agent, and his agent—and many other guests—wanted to know what the story was with his contract. People would ask me, “What’s going on? Why is he not signing his contract?” For the first part of the weekend, I was stressed out by all the questions. Then I decided to let it go. It was my wedding day and I was just going to have fun. And I did. Though I probably would have preferred a small wedding, Pat wanted a big party, and so did my parents. The guest list—250 people strong—was the only thing Pat really weighed in on. Well, that and having an open bar.