The Knock at the Door

by Ryan Manion

  * Midshipmen is the name given to students at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis.

  * “The Yard” is what Annapolis midshipmen call their campus.

  Amy

  * * *

  Chapter 4

  * * *

  Tuesday, September 21, 2010

  I woke up to find an email sitting in my inbox from my husband, Brendan. He must have written it in the middle of the night. The subject line read, “Almost Home!” I was always excited to get word from him, but especially lately. I couldn’t believe Brendan was going to be back in only a matter of weeks. I’d been waiting for his return for more than six months while he and his SEAL team were deployed to Afghanistan. I was ready for it to be over, and the email was a nice reminder that it would be soon.

  It was also a welcome break from all the work-related emails I’d found myself buried under the past few weeks. I was so overwhelmed. I had started a new job just three months earlier and was working sixty to seventy hours per week, trying to establish my territory selling medical devices for rehabilitating patients.

  I was barely awake when I glanced at my inbox that morning, but my mind was alert enough to read his short note hungrily. Our communication was limited, so I always savored whatever messages I received. Along with his regular, sweet sentiments checking in on me and sharing his anticipation about coming back to our little California townhome and two rambunctious dogs, he had a favor to ask. Brendan was nothing if not a loyal and selfless friend, so not surprisingly, the favor was for someone else.

  His friend Andrew, with whom he had played lacrosse at the Naval Academy, had just arrived in Afghanistan. Andrew was with SEAL Team Four and was relieving Brendan, on SEAL Team Three. As the assistant officer in charge, or AOIC, Brendan was turning things over to Andrew and wanted to make sure he had everything he needed—including peace of mind—to do his job well.

  The email went on to say that Andrew was recently married with a young child. His wife, Marissa, was living at their home in Virginia Beach. Brendan was still trying to track down Marissa’s contact info, but he wanted me to reach out and check in on her. Brendan and I had done a couple of deployments together at this point and we knew how rocky and unsettling things can be for a couple the first time through.

  “Can you just call her? Or shoot her an email?” he wrote. “Just give her some hope about this deployment. I think it will really put Andrew’s mind at ease, too.”

  I wasn’t surprised that, even amid all the chaos of winding down his own deployment and handing the reins over to another team, this was top of mind for Brendan. He believed that family was the most important thing, and you can’t do your job well or complete a combat mission successfully if you’re worried about what’s going on at home thousands of miles away.

  Brendan and I had an unspoken rule: We never burdened each other with whatever concerns were weighing on our minds. If I told him about the stresses of my new job, I know he would just spend more time thinking about them and wishing he could help me. I would rather have him focus on finishing this deployment safely and coming home to me.

  And he knew better than to tell me about the fifty-eight combat missions he’d been on until that point in his career. That would undoubtedly launch a stream of sleepless nights for me.

  “There’s no sense worrying about things you can’t control,” he often reminded me. “And unfortunately, you can’t control what happens when I’m deployed. You can hope, you can pray, but there are some things you just can’t control.”

  The funny thing is, my Navy SEAL husband had somehow convinced me that he worked at a desk, even when he was deployed to Afghanistan. It’s surprising, when I think back now, how naive I allowed myself to be. But Brendan was just as humble as he was protective, so it was typical of him to downplay his routine.

  “What did you do today?” I’d ask him on the rare occasions we were able to talk on the phone during deployment.

  “Oh, you know. Worked out, hung with the dudes, chilled. Did some paperwork, knocked out a little work in the office, that sorta thing.”

  He was always pretty vague in those conversations, and I was happy to accept what he said at face value. Ignorance was bliss. And he was right. If I had known what he was really doing, it only would have worried me. I finished reading his email and made a mental note to reach out to Marissa as soon as he got back to me with her contact information. In the meantime, though, I was late for work.

  I had scheduled an 8 a.m. appointment with a patient, which was an earlier jump on the day than I was used to. By seven thirty, I was out the door and on my way to the patient’s home.

  Once there, as I fitted the gentleman, an older patient, for a splint, he launched into a long story about his sister. She had just died, and he felt terribly lonely without her. I felt sorry for the man and I didn’t want to be impolite, so I stayed and chatted with him longer than I normally would. I remember thinking to myself, I’m sorry about your sister, sir. But it’s nearly 10 a.m. and I’ve got other appointments. Can we try and wrap this up?

  It’s strange for me to recollect that and realize what little tolerance I had for another person’s pain at that point in my life. With the exception of Brendan’s best friend, Travis, who was killed in Iraq, I had never known the grief of losing a loved one. If I had known that, at that very moment, uniformed members of the Navy were knocking on the door to my empty townhome, perhaps I would have reacted differently toward my patient.

  I was grateful to leave the gentleman, but confused when I looked down at my phone. I had several missed calls from our corporate office and a voicemail from Brendan’s Navy command asking me to return the call. I also had several texts from friends on the West Coast. They were all wondering if I’d heard from Brendan.

  My heart sank. This can’t be good. I got in my car and decided to call work back first, since I wasn’t prepared to deal with the others. When I reached the main office, I heard the friendly voice of Loretta, our office administrator.

  “Hey, Amy. Yeah, so this guy from the Navy kept calling trying to reach you.”

  I immediately felt like I was going to throw up. Shaking, I took a deep breath. “Well,” I managed to get out. “What did he say?”

  “I think everything’s fine,” Loretta told me. I let out a sigh of relief. Okay, so whatever it is, it can’t be that bad. “But he’d like to meet with you. I told him about the conference our company is having in La Jolla, about twenty-five minutes from where you are right now, and he said you should meet him there.”

  I hung up the phone feeling a little better. “Everything is fine,” I reminded myself. She seemed calm, right? And after listening to the voicemail from Navy command, I figured the caller sounded pretty composed, too. I clung to these two conclusions because I needed to believe they were true.

  I typed the hotel address into my GPS. Loretta was right: It was estimating twenty-five minutes with traffic. As soon as I started to drive, however, my overactive brain kicked into gear and revealed just how uncertain and scared I was. I felt hot and then weak and then nauseated. I couldn’t calm myself and took every wrong turn available to me. I was very confused, and my mind was racing. I couldn’t focus on anything for more than a few seconds. I tried calling my sister-in-law, Ali, who lived nearby, but she didn’t pick up. I left a distracted voicemail asking her to go immediately to the hotel in La Jolla to meet me. The twenty-five-minute drive took me an hour and a half. The only way I got through it was by convincing myself that Brendan was injured and I’d be flying to Germany later that day to meet him at the hospital and nurse him back to health.

  I knew I couldn’t even fathom, much less handle, Brendan being gone.

  Finally, I turned down the street to the hotel. Once it was in sight, I abandoned my car—leaving the door open, keys in the ignition, purse in plain sight—in the middle of the street. At this point, I wasn’t thinking; I was merely reacting. I rushed into the lobby, which was full of men in full dress military
uniforms. As soon as they spotted me, their conversations stopped dead. Their expressions were pained. That’s when I knew the truth. Brendan wasn’t coming back.

  Before they could say anything, I burst into tears. Ali had made it to the hotel before I had, and when I spotted her in the lobby, she started sobbing. Everyone, including co-workers, had been waiting for me because I’d told them I would only be twenty-five minutes. I’m sure they had started to worry, since it took me well over an hour.

  I couldn’t tell you what happened in that hour if I tried. I don’t remember it at all. I could have easily killed someone on the road, and to this day that thought makes me sick. My cries echoing throughout the lobby were so loud and uncontrolled that I’m sure I was making a terrible scene. But I didn’t care.

  Members of Brendan’s Navy command, as well as Ali and a few co-workers, escorted me into a hotel guest room to ensure our conversation would be private. I think I threw up either in the hotel room or on the way to it, but even that is a blur to me now. As soon as we crammed into the room, I sat on the corner of a plush, king-size bed. The room felt hollow and sterile. I looked at the boring art hanging on the neutral-colored walls and felt far away from what was happening around me.

  It was there, hunched at the foot of the bed, that I received official notification from two uniformed service members that my husband, Navy Lieutenant Brendan Looney, had been killed in Afghanistan. He and eight others had died in a helicopter crash the night before—not long after he had sent the email. My co-workers and my sister-in-law held me as I seized with overpowering sobs.

  What no one tells you about losing a loved one unexpectedly is that emotions—as raw and intense as they may be at that time—quickly take a backseat to planning and logistics. Thankfully, Ali, who was married to Brendan’s brother, was an absolute warrior during the whole process. She saw to it that I was driven home from the hotel. On the way to our town house, she called every friend Brendan or I had and instructed them, “Drop what you’re doing. Go to Amy and Brendan’s place right now. We need people there and we’re going to need help with everything.”

  When I arrived back at the town house, it no longer felt like home, even though it was filled with the love of our West Coast military family. The people there—through no fault of their own—couldn’t fill the void left behind by the one I’d lost. They wanted to be close to me, even if it was just to sit on the couch and stare blankly ahead at another episode of How I Met Your Mother.

  No one seemed to know what to do or say. We gathered in my living room, where I’m sure there was plenty of conversation, but I don’t know that I joined in any of it. I was too busy checking my phone every five minutes, certain that I’d receive a text from Brendan. I truly believed that at any moment he’d send me a note apologizing for the confusion and assuring me that everything was okay. I didn’t care what the uniformed men had said. There was no way that Brendan really was gone forever.

  Still, I was grateful that the home was not empty, and that there were plenty of capable people around to make decisions for me. At that point, I was incapable of making them myself. During the course of the day, Ali spent hours handling phone calls and navigating difficult conversations since I had no interest in talking to anyone outside immediate family.

  I felt bad that I couldn’t talk to everyone who was calling to express their condolences, but I simply wasn’t in the frame of mind to console others. I could barely handle my own thoughts. For the next few hours, Ali and I scrambled to reschedule the work meetings and appointments I had coming up. I couldn’t think straight and I needed help accomplishing even the smallest tasks. I was pacing around my bedroom trying to figure out what I was supposed to do next. Was I supposed to go somewhere? How would I get there? What would I pack? Was I expected to tell other people now? How did this work?

  The Navy had assigned me a casualty assistance officer to help answer these questions. He had been there in the hotel with us and had gone to our townhome, too, but I hadn’t even noticed him at first. Ali spoke with him in hushed tones out in the hallway and then came to find me pacing in my bedroom.

  “We have to fill out some paperwork, Amy,” she said. Then she led me down the hall like I was a small child. I was grateful to have someone parent me in that moment.

  Together we worked through the paperwork that had to be completed immediately, and she somehow managed to furnish the officers with important documents—wills and power-of-attorney statements—that she found upstairs in a labeled folder. She knew where all my clothes were and went through my closet to pack a bag for me.

  The Navy had booked me on a red-eye flight to the East Coast that would depart that night. Everything was happening so quickly. I was to arrive at 7 a.m. the next day in Philadelphia, where I would meet my mom and sister at the airport.

  From there, we would drive seventy-two miles to Dover Air Force Base, Delaware, where I would join Brendan’s family and Travis’s family to greet my husband’s body when it arrived from Afghanistan.

  Just a few hours earlier, as I scanned Brendan’s email, I had been excitedly anticipating a joyous reunion with my husband. And now I was dreading a torturous, and final, goodbye.

  I’m not even thirty years old and I’m a widow.

  That’s all I could think about as I stared out the window on the five-hour flight from San Diego to Philadelphia. Even the word widow made me shudder. It evoked an image of a gray-haired, hunched-over woman dressed in black. One day, I thought, my blond hair will turn silver and my straight spine will shrivel up. Then I’ll look the part. Until then, I figured, I’ll just spend the next few decades biding my time, waiting for that day to come. Things were looking overwhelmingly bleak.

  I had never planned on marrying young. Brendan knew that. I was the product of divorced parents and had been raised by a single mother who worked eighty hours each week to support me and my sister. I respected my mom’s work ethic, but I was scared of making an ill-informed decision in my twenties that I’d have to live with for the rest of my life.

  And then, of course, I met Brendan. “Twenty-five is too young to marry,” I told him when we first talked about marriage. I hadn’t considered that I’d be alone again at twenty-nine.

  The entire experience was surreal. Instead of preparing to kiss my husband for the first time in nearly seven months, I was on my way east to meet a body. On the airplane, when that thought hit me, my brain froze. I was confused. I couldn’t process what was happening. How do you prepare to make decisions after losing your spouse so young? How do you say goodbye to the one person around whom you had planned your entire future?

  Those first few weeks, I felt like a child, passively accepting plans that others were making for me. I worried that I wasn’t in the right mind-set to make rational decisions about what to do next. As someone who prides herself on being decisive and independent, I found myself in an incredibly difficult place. I had lots of other people to think of, including Brendan’s relatives, and I wanted to do right by him. I wanted to make decisions—about his funeral, about his burial—that I would feel good about decades down the road.

  And yet I was also convinced this was all happening to someone else. I spent much of that plane ride still wondering if the news about Brendan’s death was just a huge mistake that someone would correct when we touched down in Philly.

  Reality didn’t hit me, in fact, until I saw Brendan’s body. To see my husband lying lifeless was the hardest thing I’d ever experienced. I looked down at him in the casket, and I knew it was my Brendan. But he looked distorted. His skin was sallow and his bone structure misaligned. I later learned that his neck had been broken in the helicopter crash that killed him. Of the nine men on that helicopter, only one had survived. It was Andrew, the teammate whom Brendan had emailed me about the day before, asking me to check on his wife.

  At Dover, I greeted Brendan’s parents and siblings and our friends and family who had gathered to welcome him home. Janet Manion had lost
her son, Travis, Brendan’s best friend, only three years before. She held me tightly. I could feel her heart breaking all over again when she looked at me. We hugged, and as we endured a stretch of intense, shared pain, I had the first clear thought I’d had in twenty-four hours. It was the only decision I remember making in the early days after Brendan died, but it was the best one I could have made.

  Suddenly, a lightbulb went off: Travis and Brendan would be buried together, I decided. That was what needed to happen. I told Janet what I wanted, and she looked confused and sympathetic, as though I were a lost child whom she wasn’t quite sure how to help.

  “But Amy, honey, Travis is buried in Pennsylvania at our family plot.”

  “Fine,” I remember saying. “Then Brendan will be with him.”

  Janet’s expression immediately shifted. Her characteristic self-assurance shone in her eyes. And she wasn’t looking at me with sympathy anymore. She was looking at me with respect.

  “Okay, then,” she said. “That’s what we’ll do. But it won’t be in Pennsylvania. That wouldn’t be right.” I was taken aback by this last part. “We’ll move Travis to Arlington and bury him there. Brendan will be right by his side.”

  I didn’t realize it at the time, but there were a number of hurdles we’d have to jump in order to make all this happen. Moving Travis’s remains required approvals from the secretary of the army, who oversaw Arlington National Cemetery, as well as from the secretary of defense. And it would mean that Travis’s re-interment would need to take place within days so that Brendan could be buried beside him immediately after. I didn’t lift a finger to make any of this happen, but within forty-eight hours, it was settled. Travis would be moved to Arlington on a Friday, and Brendan would be laid to rest beside him the following Monday.