4...3...2...1...

 

When the call came in, it was simple enough. “Hey, one of you four guys on this email. We need one of you to take this deployment. Who’s volunteering to go?”

Not surprisingly, no one volunteered.

I knew then that J would end up going though. (It’s what he does.)

“Ok, you guys, if no one volunteers, I’m going to just have to pick one of you.”

And of course for J and me, *that* became the worst part. Having no control. Not being the one to call the shots. Those who know us know that neither J nor I deal well with ambiguity (OR not being the one to call the shots, for that matter.)

So then naturally the wagering began. The what-ifs. The conjectures. Who else is on the list? What are their stories? Their qualifications? What are our chances? How can we get in front of this thing? Like a desperate junkie, I started the mental bargaining…If you just keep him here, I’ll do anything…I’ll be a better person…I’ll give more to charity…I’ll stop complaining about work…and on and on through the familiar list of things people are willing to do to stave off the ugly in their lives.

But none of that mattered, because I already knew (in my heart…) that it was going to be J.

There are a thousand things I love about my husband. One of the most incredible (and sometimes the most frustrating) is his unbelievable sense of duty, of loyalty, and of dedication to whatever it is he has decided to do—of fulfilling his obligations, and for stepping up for those things in which he truly believes are his ills to address.

He decided to be a Solider seventeen years ago. And since then, he has never once shirked a duty; never volunteered someone else to do something he felt to be his job; Duty. Responsibility.

“Well, there are only four of us with this skill set. I’ve dodged this ask before (By the way, this was an interesting little news tidbit for me. I didn’t know that he had done that. Evidently right after Ellie was born, he side-stepped this same, annual deployment ask to stay at home with us.) “I have three years left in the Army…and if this is going to come up every year at this time...and I’ve already missed this once…and there are only four of us who can do this job…”

 Silence. Realization. Resignation. He was going to have go back. If not now, then sometime before he retired in three years. There was no getting around it. It was now or…

“If I go now…you keep your job. Ellie’s younger—she realizes less what is going on. She stays in her routine. You have friends here. Family close. People to help and support you. If we PCS-ed to a new city—new job, no friends or family, Ellie uprooted in a new school, new routine… and THEN I had to leave you guys with no resources…”

All totally valid. And logical. And maddening.

“Yeah, but what if we never got that call? What if you wouldn’t have to go at all ever again? How can I let you *volunteer* for this? Give you up if I don’t have to? There’s no guarantee this comes up again, is there? ”

More silence.

“Let me call someone. I know a guy. What if I can make it only six months? What if one of the other guys on the list picks up the other 6 months? Six quick months. And then I’m back. And then we move together to our last PCS, we do two years there, and then we retire. And we’re done. No more deployment. No more separation.”

More silence. Running thousands of scenarios in my head each second. Watching not my past-life flash before my eyes, but rather all the different future lives I might live depending on how this one decision played out (isn’t that pretty much how life works though? A series of small decisions we make every day which end up mapping out the rest of days…)

What seemed like a lifetime passed in about 7 heartbeats.

 “Yeah. Do it. Make the call. ” I told him to do it. I told him to go.

It didn’t really matter though. It’s what was going to happen anyway. From the first email, I knew. And even if I had broken down and begged him not to go, he would have gone anyway. It’s what he does. It’s his job, yes. But more than that, it’s his heart.

In the next three and a half weeks, when the Army was going back and forth about needing him—about whether or not the assignment was valid—about whether anything would come up again in the next three years at all, I still knew he’d go. I had resigned myself to it. I had mentally already let him go. It was the best decision for our family, and we all knew it. Don’t get me wrong—it was also the absolute shittiest decision for our family. But it was the right one. Because often in life the best decisions we make tend to be the hardest ones.

                                                         *          *        *          *        *

About a week after we had gotten final word that he was for real going and we had settled ourselves to what that looked like, one of my best friends and I had tickets to see my very favorite musicians of all time. Over dinner, pre-concert, he and I were hashing out this turn of events and all the details of what life was going to look like while J was gone.

I was trying to describe how I felt— how there was a certain sense of relief in just making a decision and going with it. Not fighting it. Being totally overwhelmed and sad, and somehow, sort of at peace with it. But I didn’t really have the words. How do you describe what it means to resign yourself to a goodbye, when it’s the last thing you really want to do?

Later that night, at the concert, while Ben Folds was singing it came to me. Ben Folds was saying it better than I ever could in my own words (Ben always does this, by the way. He has been my words when I’m wordless on more occasions than I can count.) And while the song he was singing that struck me so was about a truly difficult break up with someone he loved deeply, the lyrics still fit for what I was feeling and spoke to me.

And there *may* have been tears (tears then…tears every time I’ve heard the song since then…tears when I played the song on the way home from the airport after having dropped J off…)

“I’m letting you go…” says Ben. It may have been predetermined by the Army or God or my husband’s good nature or all of the above, but something about me saying “I’m letting you go” makes me feel like I had some control over it all, which weirdly makes me feel a little bit better.

Since that day, every time I wonder what the hell we’re doing here, it’s the chorus of this song that comes back to me (thanks again, Ben.)

As I walked away from the airport having just put J on an airplane, sobbing face hidden poorly behind super-large shades, all I could hear in my head were Ben’s lyrics. (I will let go, if you will let go…) Not particularly special nor eloquent. Quirky and a little silly (much like me and J and Ben for that matter...) I hope that others can appreciate the greatness of Ben’s simplicity when listening to this song.

And for those of you who have asked how I’m feeling? This is pretty much it.

Ben sings "Cologne"  

Where there's a will...

 

My father passed away in April. 

I miss him tremendously. My father was my anchor to good; the one who kept me grounded to the way things *should* be. Whenever I called, whenever I visited, he was there, with the sweetest smile, the most ridiculous of corny puns, and all the time in the world for me—like that I didn’t live half way across the country; like I saw him every day instead of every 4 months.

He was kinder than most people take the time to be. And humbler than most people believe is real (he’d be mortified by this post, by the way… I’ll post it anyway.) He was also hard on me—the good kind of hard. The kind that when I said I was on the brink of something that felt overwhelming, would force me to talk out the alternatives however painful—to figure out a plan—to find a way to fix it, whatever it was. Or to maybe just accept the reality that it might just suck, and that’s how life was sometimes. 

I honestly never remember him being angry with me or me being truly mad at him. Even in the ugly teenage years when everyone is angry with their parents. Not me and dad. We understood each other on a level that didn’t consist of words. He couldn’t tell you what my favorite food was, but he could tell you precisely why a particular piece of music reduced me to tears (he’d cry too…) Because while we didn’t come to the same conclusions almost ever, we went through a very similar thought process to get to our own individual outcomes. We didn’t think ALIKE, we just THOUGHT alike. 

The days since his passing have included moments of mourning, for certain. But all in all, I can truly say that dad’s passing was a great, great blessing—the quick and unexpected end before the pain and medications came—the cure to his extraordinary loneliness before it became so sharp that he couldn’t breathe anymore. More than any person I’ve ever known, my father was at peace with his life, well before his death, and was profoundly faithful. I don’t know much about much, but I know that if anyone goes to heaven and lives forever in a state of peace and rest and contentment, it is my Father. He had always been ready for what’s next, even if those close to him weren’t ready for him to go just yet.

My father, ever the purist, full of trust and devoid of any earthly belongings (can’t take it with ya) didn’t feel the need for a will—his possessions were few; his debts little; and his trust that we’d know what to do about it when the time came trumped his belief in a lawyer and extra documents and the assigning of tasks and possessions. In the days since his passing, I’ve worked my way through his accounts; his bills; his meticulously hand-written accounts of everything (Turns out, I come by that naturally.) It reminds me of his humanity. It brings me the greatest of joy to see on his credit card bills that even until his last few weeks on this Earth, he was going to the independent art cinema to see a movie, his favorite bar for a cocktail, and his favorite restaurant for a good meal and a quality conversation with whomever was sitting at the bar. These were his routines and the things that made him happy. Thinking about them makes me happy too. 

Two weeks ago, J and I went to a lawyer and got our wills done. Yeah. That happened. Now, I know this is a normal activity for grown up responsible people. To have a plan. To think about the unthinkable. To write things down on paper so that people don’t have to make tough decisions in our absence or pay our bills upon our passing. 

And yet, neither this very grown up rational thinking nor my own sometimes frustrating experience dealing with my father’s estate sans will took away the harsh reality of what we were doing or made me want to be there doing it. 

I’d feel like this regardless of the timing of our visit. But making this trip to the ol’ lawyer right before you get ready to send your husband into a war zone? Yeah. That’s as awful as it sounds. It’s like having to admit out loud the one thing that you’re trying really hard not to admit could ever possibly happen, could definitely happen: The thing you avoid thinking about, all you’re talking about for three straight hours. But we knew that it would be irresponsible for us to not do this. To not have a plan. To not have it all put down on paper. Especially now that Eleanore is in the picture. (Plus, I think the Service makes you do it once you have a family. Not the point, I know…)

Now, I know that lawyers are not paid to be, shall we say, touchy-feely. And I know that as long as we deal with the lawyers who are made available to us free of charge that we don’t have a whole lot to be picky about. Beggars and choosers and that whole thing, right? And I know that these lawyers deal with the whole gamut of service members to include the 19 year-old Joe who wants to leave his new Camero to his 17 year old girlfriend (too real?) I get it. 

But dearest Lord. If that women looked at us and without emotion uttered any iteration of the phrase “Ok, you’re gone, he’s dead, Ellie’s dead, who gets your stuff/ pays your bills/ pulls your plug?” one more time, I was going to jump straight across her military issue big-oak-lawyer desk and make her eat my end-of-life plan. At a time when all I’m working through in my head (and my heart) is counting the days until J and I get to spend the rest of our lives together, having some random lady talk about what to do if that doesn’t happen…it was just too real. And mostly horrible.

But it’s done. And put into a lockbox, never to be opened again. For at least 40 years. 

As I was leaving the lawyers office I realized that all I wanted to do in that moment was talk to my dad. Tell him about how insensitive that crazy lawyer lady had been. How much I didn’t want to think about death. How scared I was. But as much as I wanted to talk to Dad, I realized that I already knew what he would say to me. He’d tell me that sometimes things are hard. And not fun. And that the most important thing is that I was taking care of my family, and if I was doing what was best for them, then I was probably doing the right thing no matter how crappy it all felt. Then he’d remind me I’m a grown up, and I’m strong, and that this would all work out just fine. Part of a plan bigger than me. To have a little faith already. 

And the end of my fictional conversation with Dad? “You know Angie, where there’s a will… there’s a way.” And he would wait in silence on the other end of the phone for the groan that I always gave when he made those sorts of horrible puns. Even through the phone, in my mind I could see his impish grin, so proud of himself. Even through the phone, he’d know I was shaking my head in feigned disapproval. 

We’d end the call as we always did. “I love you Dad.” “I love you too.” 

With Dad, having a will or not having a will didn’t matter. Nothing on a document like that contains a bit of what he left me. And I guess that a grumpy, insensitive, fast-talking, patronizing , lawyer-lady with her wills and paperwork and plans really doesn’t do anything to define my legacy either. What matters, today, as always, is taking care of my family—instilling good habits in the kiddo; making good memories as a family; showing love to one another, and making sure that Eleanore knows some of her PawPaw’s good jokes.

And a will? Meh. If it’s necessary and makes people feel better, then fine. Really, it’s just a document to provide some order in potential chaos. A peace of paper, as it were. 

Pun definitely intended.