A Journal for Jordan

by Dana Canedy

  Her boyfriend lifted you out of my arms as I tried to compose myself. Who was going to teach you to be a man? I wondered as you played with his tie. Who would ever understand me the way Charles did? No one else would look at me with such passion— whether I had gained or lost weight, cut my hair or grown it long, had bad breath or a minty-fresh mouth. No one else would know my secrets, would kiss me like him, smell like he did.

  It had taken a long time to find a love so powerful, and longer still to appreciate what I had found. I was certain it was as rare as a rainbow after a snowstorm and that I would never know it again.

  The ceremony ended with “Taps.” I wanted to leave, but so many people wanted to meet you. A slight white woman who appeared to be in her thirties approached me in the parking lot.

  “Hi, I’m Valerie Lauer,” she said. “I just want you to know that my husband told me that the first sergeant was the best boss he ever worked for. He really respected him.”

  I hugged and thanked her. She held me in her embrace longer than usual.

  It was not until after she walked away that I realized who she was: her husband had died in the vehicle with your father. My eyes darted around the parking lot, searching for her. I did not find her again that day and felt sick that I had not offered condolences of my own.

  When we finally made it back to the Fisher House, some of the families had already checked out and others were in their suites. You were the bright spirit that your grandparents, Christina, and I needed that evening. We had the living room to ourselves and laughed at your wobbly attempts at walking and fascination with some fake flowers in the room. Gail wanted to go through the belongings your father had left in storage near the base, but I did not want to leave you, and my grief was still so raw that I simply could not go through his things. She went without me.

  We slept hard that night, you curled up next to me, both of us worn out from the long day. The morning came quickly and I said good-bye to the people with whom we had shared so much. I knew we would probably never see any of them again, just as I knew I would never forget their faces.

  The public mourning was over, but the private pain was just beginning. It was there later, in New York, when I wrote deceased in the space intended for a father’s name on the application for your preschool. It was there when I dreamed about Charles cradling my hips and awoke reaching for him. It was there when a cabdriver asked if I was married and I said no. It was always there.

  Seventeen

  Dear Jordan,

  Saturday mornings are the hardest.

  It is late fall 2007, barely a year since your dad died. I take you to the park before your afternoon nap and there are weeks when I am the only mother there. It took me awhile to figure out why. It is daddy day. The mothers, I assume, are still sleeping, or reading the newspaper. Perhaps having lattes. I look out of place among the fathers chasing wobbly toddlers, or maybe I just feel that way.

  There is nothing I would rather do on those mornings than watch you chase a bird or crunch leaves in your hands, but that weekly reminder of your father’s absence can be wrenching. Once I sobbed so hard pushing you on a swing that I startled you. I did not hide my sorrow because in time you will understand that tears cleanse the soul like rain does the soil.

  When the time is right, I will tell you the reason for my suffering. And I will show you the myriad ways in which your father is remembered—from the army training base in the Mojave Desert that was renamed FOB King after his death, to the quilt two strangers handmade for you in his honor.

  For now, all I want for you is a typical childhood. So far our world revolves around playgroups, bubble baths, and endless readings of Wheels on the Bus. I rise when you do at 6 a.m., even though your dad used to tease that watching me wake up was like watching a baby suck a lemon.

  The holidays can be cruel, though not even our first Father’s Day was as torturous as the first winter after your father’s death. That would have been our first holiday season as a family. On Thanksgiving, Charles would have held my hand and prayed over the Cornish hen and candied yams. He would have told God how much we had to be thankful for in the past year. On Christmas Day, he would have taken us to Central Park, just as he had promised. When we returned home, I would have put on holiday music and made hot apple cider.

  Even in the depth of my grief over what we would have done and now would never be, I could not ignore your first Christmas.

  So on Christmas morning in 2006, just two months after your dad died, I watched you play with the wrapping paper and bows and pay little attention to the music box and stuffed animals. Then I zipped you in a fleece snowsuit and took you to Central Park alone. In a horse-drawn carriage, you and I snuggled under a blanket while the driver pointed out landmarks and I tried to smile. I could not keep it up. The driver seemed confused about why I was riding alone with a baby and weeping on Christmas Day. I told him.

  When he helped me to the ground at the end of the trail, he said, “No charge.” In a city that has away of magnifying loneliness, it was an act of kindness I will never forget.

  A few months ago, when you were about a year and a half, you started pointing to pictures of your father and saying “Daddy.” I felt a rush of excitement the first time you said it, but then sadness. I was just so sorry that your father would never hear you say that beautiful word. Mostly, I was sad for you—that you will never again fall asleep in his arms, never feel his hand on your back on a park swing, never watch him shave.

  And yet because of the journal he left, you will know your dad more intimately than many people know fathers who are living. Your father wrote a letter to you on the last page of the journal that I hope you will treasure as I do.

  I also hope that what I have written will help you to understand the remarkable love your father and I shared. I want you to have that kind of love, Jordan. It is not the kind that always looks perfect. It is not the kind in which you promise never to go to bed mad. We sometimes did. No, it is more consequential than that.

  It is the kind that will enable you to imagine loving a woman’s wrinkled face someday, not simply the one that glows on your wedding day. It is a love that does not ask her to be anyone other than who she is, and that does not ask any more of you.

  It also requires you to go on with your life if hers is cut short. You will talk, scream—or write—your way through the pain, because she would have expected no less.

  It is not easy to teach all this by example. Grieving is a process you survive one heartbeat at a time, but finding the fortitude to endure is one of life’s true wonders.

  Before Charles was taken from me, I had never experienced death, except as a reporter covering a story. I always assumed I would be angry at God if someone close to me died. Just the opposite happened. There were days when my memories and prayers were all that got me through. Others were brightened by the most unexpected things. A box of herbal teas arrived with a note from a friend I had not heard from in years. A woman I worked with in Cleveland more than a decade ago sent us a collection of carols to help us through the holidays. A stay-at-home mother who lives in our building slipped a note under our door offering to sit with you if I needed a hand. Strangers who read about our loss sent cards and books and stuffed animals. A group of high school students from Connecticut wrote you letters that I am saving in a special box. The Art Institute of Chicago awarded your father an art degree posthumously.

  The pain of losing the man I love still permeates my entire being, but so much munificence has been a salve. That is not to say I am the woman I used to be, the one who squealed at sunsets and danced barefoot in the living room. Because of your father’s devotion, though, I am no longer the woman who did not believe in everlasting love.

  Perhaps much further along in my healing I will find someone’s hand to hold again. It is just too soon to imagine it. A boyfriend from college was in town recently and asked me out to dinner, and I accepted at the urging of family and friends. He had heard about you
r father’s death but had probably not intended to spend the entire evening listening to me talk about him. My old friend was gracious—but he also wanted to know what I was doing to reclaim the feisty, vivacious woman he had known. I said that she was still deep within, but that I was not ready to think of myself as anything other than Charles’s widow.

  I will never be the same person I was, but I will be whole again, in time. What I pray for most is to be the kind of mother Charles deserved for his only son.

  My prayer for you, Jordan, is that you carry with you the knowledge that you will always have two parents guiding you through life. I will rely on a mother’s intuition to show you the way, but that alone will not be enough to teach you to be a man. For that, I give you your father’s journal, and the wisdom it contains:

  Mission accomplished.

  Epilogue

  Dear Charles,

  As I write this, it is January 2008, a year and three months since you went away. Our son is twenty-one months old and his energy is so infectious that it sustains us both when I am most weary. So does my certainty that you can hear me when I need to talk to you—not my voice, but the essence of what I have to say. This is what I need you to know:

  You do not need to worry about Jordan and me. He is flourishing and I am finding my way, taking baby steps to regain my balance, just as Jordan did when he began to walk. I took a leave of absence from work to write because I needed so desperately to find an outlet for my grief. Writing has always been my salvation, as you know, and it has helped me to preserve your memory and our love.

  There are still days when I cannot summon the strength even to brush my teeth. I have gained twenty-five pounds. I no longer bother putting on makeup or skirts or the leopard-print pumps you liked so much. A friend recently treated me to a tube of plum lipstick, trying to put some color back in my life, but I have yet to wear it. I sleep holding on to your favorite shirt when I am most lonely and sad—the faded blue-gray jersey you used to wear with jeans. Some nights, I roll it up and lay it across my chest so that it feels like your arm is still wrapped around me.

  Then there are days when Jordan says a new word or looks at me with chocolate pudding on his nose and I hear myself laughing out loud. It is in those moments that I remember that life does goon.

  I am not the only one coming to terms with that painful reality. Nearly one thousand more American soldiers have died in Iraq in the year since you were taken from us, and I grieve for the fathers and daughters and lovers who are feeling their way through the same darkness that I am. I pray that someone finds away to end the fighting before another woman has to bury her man and another little boy is left with only photographs of his father to kiss.

  Some of your soldiers are heading back for another tour of duty soon. I know that your spirit will be guiding them through. Others are still struggling to regain their lives. Your friend Tony retired early, just shy of twenty years of service, even though he once shared your dream of making sergeant major. He was so enraged by your death that he no longer wanted to wear the uniform. William Record is still receiving skin grafts and other medical treatment for his wounds, and as yet has no memory of the explosion. Jason Imhoff is still in the military. He continues to blame himself for what happened to you and calls me regularly.

  In fact, you would be so proud to know how many of your men still call and visit us. Jordan has so many new uncles who want to tell him about you. It is amusing to watch their reaction when they see him for the first time. They draw a quick breath, stunned.

  “My God, he looks just like the first sergeant,” they inevitably say.

  Jordan lost all his baby fat after he started walking and has been a mirror image of you ever since. Christina stares at him and shakes her head in amazement, too.

  Your daughter is doing well, considering. She is about to graduate from high school and plans to spend part of the summer with us. I love telling her funny stories about your slow driving or the time you fought against going to a spa with me, then fell into a blissful sleep during the his-and-hers massages.

  Being with her baby brother seems to comfort Christina. She dotes on Jordan when she visits, feeding him ice cream and chasing him around the children’s museum. I am so sorry you never got to see them together, just as I am that you never got to see what a spirited, confident boy your son has become.

  Our son has already learned to climb out of the crib we bought when I was pregnant. I replaced it with a “big boy bed” that one of my girlfriends helped me put together. He has not actually slept an entire night there, though, because he prefers your spot in our bed. (We’re working on it.)

  Jordan has become quite the little New Yorker, too. He already knows how to hail a taxi and recently sat through an entire play at a children’s theater in Greenwich Village.

  It is too early to tell how your death will affect him or how much he misses you, though I know that he does. Some days he covers his eyes and says “peek-a-boo, Daddy.” I sobbed the first time he did it but now his little game makes me smile. I wonder if you are actually there playing with him.

  Like me, Jordan’s favorite question is “Why?” The answers are simple for now: because the oven is hot, because eating that plastic could cause you to choke. One day he will ask “Why?” and there will be no easy answers. When that time comes, I will be honest. If he wants to know what this war was about and what I thought of it, I will tell him.

  All I have said so far is that his daddy is a hero who wrote a beautiful journal for him. I said that you made sure that all of our needs would be taken care of if you were called on to make the ultimate sacrifice. I said you were just that kind of man.

  I know he did not understand all of what I said, but I will keep telling him until he does. He should know that Mommy will always take care of him, but that I am not doing it alone.

  I am also trying to find ways to take care of myself. You remember the spot on my ankle that you liked to kiss? I have had your name tattooed there, apermanent symbol of our love and a substitute for the wedding band I will never wear. As the artist carved the thin script into my skin and surrounded it with tiny hearts and delicate swirls, I welcomed the sting of the needle, distracting me from the larger pain.

  A friend gently asked if I had considered what another man might someday think of the tattoo. I said that I would hope he would understand that it is the mark of a woman whose love is forever. But the truth is I cannot imagine falling in love again.

  I would trade a lifetime with anyone else for just one more day with you. I would tell you I am haunted by guilt for the years I wasted questioning whether we were right for each other. I would tell you that you taught me how to love, and that you helped me to be a better woman because of the dignity with which you lived your life. I would savor your smile as you watched our little boy play and would let my fingers trace the lines of your face and the veins on your hands.

  Then I would put Jordan in your arms one last time and lie there with him until you had to go home again.

  It has been hard accepting that I am a widow, but I know the time has come to start focusing on my future without you. It is time for me to get back in the gym, which would no doubt amuse you. I may take Jordan to visit friends in Paris in the spring. I might even put on that plum lipstick someday soon and go to a jazz club with my girlfriends.

  I know that the more I heal the easier you will rest, and the more present I will be as a mother. Mostly, though, I owe it to myself to find a reason to dance again.

  Jordan and I were cuddling in bed the other morning and he touched my face and said, “I happy.”

  I held him tighter, drawing on his warmth and his exuberance.

  “I’m happy, too,” I said.

  At that moment, at least, I meant it.

  Author’s Note

  The thing that has guided me most in writing this memoir is the knowledge that the ultimate reader of it is my son, Jordan.

  All of the people and events in this bo
ok are real. The chronology is as exact as I remember it. Memory is imperfect, but all the dialogue between Charles and me is also exactly as I remember it, with no embellishments. Where I have quoted my family, Charles’s family, the soldiers who served with Charles, or other military personnel, those quotations are drawn from interviews conducted by me or, in some cases, one of my two research assistants.

  The majority of the extracts from Charles’s journal are exactly as he wrote them. In two or three instances, I’ve combined similar entries. I have also made very minor changes to spelling, grammar, and punctuation for the sake of clarity.

  I am mindful of the fact that I have written about some extremely personal matters related to both my family and to Charles’s family. I have included only those details I believe to be essential if Jordan and the reader are to understand Charles and me and how our relationship unfolded. I hope our families will forgive me any errors, and that they will understand the spirit in which the book is written and my desire to tell Jordan the truth about his parents’ lives.

  Acknowledgments

  There are so many people I must thank for being a part of this book, whether through inspiration or direct involvement.

  Foremost, to Almighty God, I humbly thank you for the gift of Charles and Jordan. I thank you, too, for blessing me with a talent and passion for writing. Above all, I thank you for your everlasting love. I seek to be in service to you with this book and in all that I do.

  There are no words sufficient to express my gratitude to the men who served with my Charles in the ist Battalion, 67th Armored Regiment, 2nd Brigade, 4th Infantry Division from Fort Hood, Texas—the Dealers. Charles loved each and every one of you! Thank you especially to all of the Dealers who spent hours letting me interview you for this book. I will never forget you or your generosity.