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Fallen Heroes by Janine di Giovanni Westbrook, Maine, USA The day in April Ryann Roukey found out her husband Larry had been blown apart by an explosion in Iraq was a late spring day, grey and drizzly with rain, but otherwise a day like every other. She left work at Central Maine and Power, where she works as an administrative assistant, picked up her 2-year old son Nicholas from day care and dropped him at home with her teenaged daughter Sonya so she could shop for dinner. Everything was normal. "Just an ordinary day," she remembers. She was in a good mood. The day before, she spoke to Larry, a 33-year old postal worker who had shipped out to Iraq on March 5 and was based at a camp outside of Baghdad. He told her he was leaving the next day, "to go on a mission". He couldn't say what; but told his wife she could see the diary he was keeping when he got back home. He had been in Iraq for less than six weeks. Then Ryann held the phone out to Nicholas, who told his father he loved him. "You guys sound good," Larry said cheerfully, when Ryann got back on. She thought Larry seemed happier having spoken to their son. "His spirits lifted," she said. She hung up feeling that everything was going to be just fine. There was a van in the driveway with government plates when she got home, which should've signalled her that something was wrong. "But never, ever did I consider the worse," she says. Then Sonya met her at the door with a grim face. "What's wrong?" Ryann asked, as Sonya took the shopping bags from her mother, and motioned to the men sitting on the sofa. Ryann walked slowly inside the pretty house on the pretty street in the pretty town she had shared with Larry for years, suddenly feeling dread. "If felt like I was in the movies," she said. The men were military chaplains. They told Ryann there had been an accident involving Larry. "And at that moment, my whole life changed in a matter of seconds." Sonya says Ryann began to cry and walk round and around in circles, in a complete panic as the men explained that Larry – an Army Reservist with the 3rd Battalion 304th Regiment – had died with another soldier from Pennsylvania in an explosion at a suspected chemical weapons factory. He was working for the Iraq Survey Group who report to the CIA. The explosion was (and still is) under investigation. None of this made any sense to Ryann, a muscular, well-built blonde who always wears a bracelet engraved with I LOVE YOU, a present from Larry. She is the kind of person who figured life would just on as it always had: she and Larry and their two kids. She first spotted Larry 10 years ago where he was working as a bouncer at a bar called The Bahama Beach Club, and confidently told her girlfriend, "I'm gonna marry that guy. " They were just two average middle-class kids in love. The worse thing that could happen to them was the long separation when Larry went off to Reserve duty. It just never occurred to Ryann that Larry was never going to call home again on Sunday mornings at 7:30 a.m. like he always did. And that he would be coming home in a coffin draped with the American flag. At about the same time that Ryann was getting the news that Larry was dead, Betsy Coffin, who lives a bit south from Westbrook down Highway I-95 in Kennebunk – summer residence of the former President George Bush – was still trying to work out exactly what happened when her husband Chris, a 51-year old former park ranger and police officer, died in Iraq, nearly one year before. Chris was also a Reservist, and after his death received the unfortunate sobriquet as being one of the oldest casualties in the war. It didn't make Betsy feel any better knowing that Chris had tried to retire from the Reserves before he went to Iraq, but a Stop Order from the government prohibited it. When he left for the Gulf, Betsy had a bad feeling. So did Chris, but he was a good soldier - he came from a long line of military and had joined the Reserves way back in 1971 – so he swallowed it and went. "He had an awful feeling he was not coming back," Betsy says. The couple were deeply committed to each other – they had just renewed their wedding vows – and had no children. But each separation was getting harder. Chris had spent 9 months in Kosovo before going to Iraq, where he celebrated his 50th birthday, and Betsy recalls how tough the last night was before he left for the Gulf: they went out for a walk on the beach and looked at the stars. Chris pointed to a star in the sky and told Betsy that they both would be looking at the same star, just from different places. He was trying to make her feel better. But the bad feeling did not go away. The night that Chris died, July 1, 2003, Betsy had trouble falling asleep. She knew Chris was leading a convoy down Route 8, between Baghdad and Kuwait, one of the most dangerous routes in Iraq. He told her he would call when he got to Kuwait, and she knew that he would keep his word. But something felt wrong. She tossed and turned and finally she got up and wandered into the living room where she pulled out some old photo albums, including her wedding to Chris in Colorado. The irony was that she had not looked at it for ages. Much later, she found out that at the same time she was smiling down at those pictures, Chris' was dying in his Humvee. The military chaplain came the next day. Betsy knew what he was there for. "I just knew," she says, her voice cracking. One year after his death, Betsy is still reeling with pain. All over Maine, there are pockets of sadness. Maine is a big state, with miles of pine-scented forests, glacier lakes and a rocky coastline which stretches up to Canada. It is rugged and remote and not the easiest place to live, unless you are the Bushes or the Rockefellers coming just for the summer. Only 1.2 million people live year-round in Maine, most of them concentrated in the south. The north is stony: a place to grow potatoes, where rates of alcoholism and incest are high. Cabin fever is a very real thing here. Snow can fall in April. It's a beautiful, hard place and as a result, Mainers are a special breed: strong, proud, with a droll sense of humour. Most communities are tight knit and solid, with roots that go back to the days of the French Canadian fur trappers. Everyone knows everyone. People go to high school together and then take their kids to Little League games together, go fishing or hunting together. In a sense, it is the essence of small town America. "Mainers have always been strongly patriotic," says Emma Dumont from Westbrook, whose family have been in military since the Revolutionary War. Her son has served in Panama, Desert Storm, Bosnia and now Iraq, and Emma is in charge of organising neighbours to send packages to all the Westbrook boys in Iraq. Things like playing cards, packets of Dunkin' Donuts coffee, fly strips, baby wipes, books, Cds. Emma is staunchly behind the war because she is staunchly behind who is fighting there – hometown boys, kids she and everybody knows. "Mainers believe in freedom," she adds, in a long, drawn out accent from Down East, which is what locals call the mid-coast of Maine. But even patriotism wanes under deep pain. The war drags on and on in Iraq with American casualties getting higher and higher – 900 by the end of July. Every morning, over coffee and blueberry pancakes, people get more stories of atrocities. The yellow ribbons so tied lovingly in nearly every small town when the boys left for war more than 18 months ago are beginning to look faded. No one likes to admit it, but there is an awful sense of déjà vu: everyone remembers Vietnam and Vietnam kicked small town America in the guts because it deprived them of the kid who delivered the morning newspaper; the kid behind the grocery counter; the kid who hit the home run at the local baseball game. Now small town America has gone to war because nearly half the soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan – Bush's War Against Terror – are either National Guardsmen or Reserve soldiers. These are civilian soldiers, citizen soldiers, essentially home town militias. Most of them sign up expecting to fight ice storms or hurricanes, or possibly build fences near the border of Mexico or Canada, – not fight insurgents in Falluja. The war is hurting Maine. For a state with a relatively small population, there were, at its highest point, 1,100 Maine National Guard or Reservists serving in Iraq, and that does not include the number of people serving in the regular forces. Only Iowa has sent more National Guardsmen. It is clear that something needs to be revamped, as most of these civilian soldiers can not possibly have the experience of full time soldiers. The current Guard and Reserve system was designed in the chaos following the Vietnam War. Neither President Lyndon Johnson nor President Richard Nixon called up reservists in great numbers, fearing even more opposition at home to their policies. The new design meant that when America went to war again with a volunteer force, hometown America would also go with them. For 25 years, these men put out fires and battled hurricanes, and the system was never really tested. Since 9/11, all that has changed. Hundreds of thousands of them are deployed in combat now, and their tours of duties are radically extended. Guard and reserve members make up approximately 40 per cent of the forces in Iraq and Afghanistan today. And the Pentagon has recently said that figure would rise to 50 per cent. It also means that this reliance on National Guardsmen and Reserve soldiers means that the casualties are older – in this war, the average is 27 years old. The average age in Vietnam was 20; the average age in Korea was 22. In small town America, most people are married with a family by the age of 27. According to the Portland Press Herald, the most influential newspaper in Maine, "The trend is having a profound impact on families, communities and domestic views about war." Larry Roukey, dead at 33 with two kids and a wife, fit neatly into this profile of the older soldier. "The problem is that Guardsmen have families," says Lavinia Gelineau, a 24-year old widow. Her husband, Chris, 23, a student, was killed in Mosul in April. When I called, Chris's personal possessions had just arrived and Lavinia was unpacking his boots and books in tears. There are also questions about how prepared these men are to go to war. Larry Roukey had been well trained – he served in active duty in the army for three years and then served two years in the National Guard. He re-enlisted in the Reserves following the 9/11 attacks and was promoted to sergeant in January 2002. And his family insist that he wanted to be in action, he wanted to serve his country. But it's not like that for everyone. Many have not been as trained or well equipped as active duty members of the military – National Guardsmen usually train one weekend a month then get a crash course before they go to Iraq. As a result, there have been problems. The military police brigade accused of abusing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, for example, were Reservists. Privately, military commanders in Washington and in combat have said that a number of reservists arrive for duty lacking specific combat skills and ill-prepared. What is often cited is that while they may certainly be brave or fit, they lack a "warrior ethos" which can not be instilled in a few short weeks before they hit hostile turf in Iraq or Afghanistan. When I stopped by a National Guard recruiting office in downtown Portland, however, I was assured by several officers that Guardsmen were sometimes better trained than active duty soldiers. They scoffed at the notion of the warrior ethos. But one soldier privately told me that so many soldiers were needed in Iraq that "people have to be rotated so that everyone gets experience in the field." This is perhaps why people like Chris Coffin were chosen, aged 51, to lead a convoy down one of the most dangerous roads in Iraq, or that Larry Roukey, the father of two, was killed in a mysterious explosion. I could not help but think that sounded too much like cannon fodder. Sadder still is that most of the men who join the National Guard do it because they need the extra cash or the educational benefits. Before 9/11, they signed up pretty much knowing they would never have to ever serve in combat. The youngest soldier killed in Maine was 23-year old Specialist Christopher Gelineau. He joined the Guards when he was 17 so he could pay for his education and get a business degree from University of Southern Maine. He met his Romanian born wife, Lavinia, when both of them were cleaning dormitories during the summer to earn extra money. "We weren't like other kids," she says softly. "We really had to work to go to school." Lavinia has been outspoken and honest in her condemnation of the war and the fact that Chris was perhaps not as prepared as he could have been before he left – he worked on computers in an administrative role. Lavinia says that before Chris left, she was investigating ways to borrow money so he could pay back his National Guard student loans, and not have to go. As a result, she had had a hard time the past few months. Lavinia is not a Mainer, and people have attacked her as being un-patriotic, as being an outsider, a "European" or simply being "angry". Nine men with ties to Maine have so far died. They are called Fallen Heroes, and they are a cast of characters that make up American small town life, or come straight from a Frank Capra movie: the local barber; the postman; the kid who scored the prize touchdown; the delivery boy; a new father whose own mother had been killed when he was small; a Park Ranger. "This touches every family in Maine," the editor of the Bangor Daily News, Mark Woodward, wrote. "These people are drawn from every community, from every walk of life." Dylan Thomas once wrote that "after the first death, there is no other." Major Jay Aubin was one of America's first soldiers to die as well as Maine's first soldier to die and most people in Skowhegan got a terrible shock because he was well known: he played football and delivered groceries from the local market. He was the only kid in the history of the town named Student of the Year. The helicopter he was flying went down on March 21, 2003, the earliest days of the war, amid a sand storm and black smoke from burning oil wells. Two other American and eight British troops were also killed in the crash. "They chalked it up to what they call 'the fog of war,' " his mother, Nancy Chamberlain, said grimly. For one year after her 36-year old son's death, Chamberlain wore a photograph of him in the place over her heart. When a year came and went, she took it off and replaced it with a small pin of a hummingbird. Because her son loved to fly. *** I wanted to understand the motivation behind America's hometown militias now making up nearly half the forces in Iraq, so I went to where they come from. Westbrook, Maine, is an old paper mill town on the banks of the Presumpscott River. Company Bravo, a National Guardsmen company, are based here, but all have shipped out to Iraq. One balmy summer night as fireflies lit up the sky and the river glowed golden, the local fire chief gave me directions to their headquarters, across from the high school on Stroudwater Street. "But you won't find anyone there," he says, pointing out the route. "They've all gone to the war." When I arrive, the place is closed like a drum, but there are yellow ribbons tied to the fence and a sign that read "Call 1-800 GO GUARD" and the American flag was flying at half mast – Ronnie Regan had died a few days before. And of course, the flag was flying low for Larry Roukey, the hometown Fallen Hero. It was dinner time on an early summer evening, and I could see behind the front windows families sitting down for their meal. Westbrook, like many towns in Maine, was originally settled by French Canadians, and even though it has expanded over the years – the population is now 15,000 – it is still a tight-knit largely working class community. Most community life centres around St. Hyacinth's Catholic Church, and if you go to Guido's Diner on Main Street in the morning for a blueberry muffin and coffee around 8:30 a.m., you will hear everything you need to know about Westbrook. Which means that everyone felt Larry Roukey's death. When the news got out, people who did not even know him rushed in to help his widow, either by bringing food, helping with the masses of beaurocratic paperwork; or planting a "victory garden" in her front yard. The headline in the local paper, The American Journal was FALLEN WESTBROOK SOLDIER 'GIANT OF A MAN' . You can take the temperature of the emotional state of Westbrook by reading recent headlines of the Journal. The main stories used to be about tax reforms or Parents express concern over class size. Now they include WESTBROOK FAMILY COPING WITH LOSS OF HUSBAND AND FATHER or HOMECOMING ON HOLD: MOTHER WANTS TO SEE SON or SGT MICHAEL LIBBY INJURED IN IRAQ. Westbrook, like America, has changed. "When Larry Roukey died," the Journal's editor, Brendan Moran, says, "there was a palpable sense of the war coming here. With someone local dying, Westbrook was grieving. It was solemn. You could feel it." Whether or not people support the war in Iraq or George W. Bush (the town is largely Democrat) Moran explains that everyone supports their troops. "No one wants to make the mistake of what happened to soldiers in Vietnam, coming home and being mistreated," he says. There are even some Iraqi dissidents living in town, who run the local liquor story, and even they support the war. I first arrived in Larry Roukey's hometown on Flag Day. I didn't know it. But as I drove through town, the air smelt like freshly cut lawns and a Little League baseball game was in heated progress on Warren Field. A couple of teenagers were hanging out hiding cans of beer under their t-shirts. There was a ceremony sponsored by Veterans of Foreign Wars in a park by the river. There, a dozen old soldiers gathered solemnly – veterans of Korea, World War II, Vietnam. Some of them leaned on canes and one wore a baseball cap. Old Glory – as the American flag is known – was held by a Vietnam veteran, Paul Boivin, and someone else read the lyrics to the Johnny Cash song, "Ragged Old Flag" "Is this the first time you've been to our little town? You see, we're proud of our ragged little flag. She went where she was sent by Uncle Sam…" A woman sang "God Bless America" and then everyone recited the Pledge of Allegiance with their left hand on their heart. Some of the soldiers had tears in their eyes, and I found myself growing as emotional as them, perhaps because all of these men had fought such incredible battles and there were only half a dozen people to honour them standing under the elm tree with me to honour them. After, the men show me the monument which lists the names of all the Westbrook residents who have served, and died, in foreign wars. For 35 US DOLLARS, a veterans name can be inscribed in a brick. Then the men begin to tell their war stories. This is the saddest part. It's a few days after the 60th anniversary of D-Day and there's a lot of nostalgia floating around America, a lot of comparisons of what happened in 1944 and what is happening today in Iraq. World War II was fought by people the American broadcaster Tom Brokaw called "the Greatest Generation". To them, fighting against the Nazis was a just war, a "good war." They tell me how they enlisted to go fight evil, to liberate Europe, when they were still teenagers, straight from working in the local mill. Iraq, in contrast, appears to baffle them. "I can't see why we're there," says Colonel Phillip Spiller, who got the Silver Star for bravery in World War II and was a former mayor of Westbrook. He's got a son in Iraq, so he chooses words carefully. "Iraq is like Vietnam – we can't tell the enemy. I support the soldiers there, but I think we're going to lose." One man, Laurent Chretien fought in the Battle of the Bulge. Another, Raymond Reitze spent 26 months in a German P.O.W. camp called Stalag 2B and weighed 96 pounds when he was finally liberated. There's men standing on the field with me who fought bloody battles in the Pacific and merchant seamen who spent World War II in submarines. "We were doing something that really mattered," Ray Reitze tells me the next day over a blueberry pancake breakfast at Guido's Diner. Ray can only eat half of his, because after the prison camp 2/3 of his stomach was removed, but he's still got some feisty views. Like nearly everyone I spoke to in Westbrook, Ray supports the troops – he had two sons in Vietnam and a grandson, Scott Mc Kinley who was a marine in Iraq – but he's ambivalent about the cause of the war. He's now 84 and he's frail, but he wants to talk about the difference between fighting in Europe in 1944 and fighting in Iraq in 2004. At the small, neat home outside of Westbrook, where he lives alone, Ray shows me the telegram that his wife received when he went missing in action. He told me how he was beaten and tortured and watched his friends die in the prison camp. War and imprisonment scarred him terribly. His walls are full of mementoes of the Stars and Stripes, of photographs of him as a young soldier before he was captured. It seems like a part of his life was left back in Stalag B in 1943. He of all people knows how horrible war really is, so when I ask him about it, he takes my hand and says with tears in his eyes, "You don't know what freedom is until you lose it." On Iraq and the death of young people like Larry Roukey, he just nods and says hollowly, "I really don't know why we are there." *** I spend a couple days in Westbrook to see how the community responded to Larry's death. Larry comes from a big extended family, half Italian, half Irish, with roots deep in the area. He grew up in the bordering town of South Portland, and his kid sister, Dotty, was a well-known high school athlete and most people knew the Roukey name. After school, Larry worked at a chain of sandwich shops, Amato's, and was best friends with the owner's son, Jeff Reali. Of Larry's death, Reali tells me solidly, "He was 33. He should have been home with his kids." When Larry died, everyone felt like they had lost a friend, or at least someone they knew well. He became a kind of Everyman; a figure of a hometown boy who had done what he was told and paid a terrible price for it. When his body arrived at Portland Airport (the airport, ironically, where the 9/11 bombers first entered the United States), the staff on the ground saluted him. At his full military funeral down at St. Joseph's Church in Portland – where Roukey married Ryann eight years ago – 600 people including the governor came to pay tribute. People lined up on Stevens Avenue and the school children were let out early so they could wave flags as Larry's coffin passed. "It was almost as though the entire state came together for the death of one soldier," says Ryann Roukey, recalling the pagentry. Dotty Roukey read the eulogy and recalled how her brother had commandeered her doll house as a child to use as his GI Joe Fortress. Soldiering went way back in the Roukey clan. His father had served in Korea, his grandfather in World War II. Larry died serving his country, was the emphasis. Dotty Roukey, a pretty, freckled red head who lost both her parents and now had to bury her only sibling, is stoic when I meet her for a beer in a downtown Portland hotel bar. "He wanted to go to Iraq," she says, picking at a plate of pretzels. "After 9/11, he felt that now was the time to defend his country." In fact, Dotty points out that Larry re-enlisted after 9/11. "He told me that if ever there was a time to help his country, it was now." But I can see the sorrow behind Dotty's bravado: she lost her only brother in the desert a long way from home. As for Ryann, she says that soldiers do their duty, but she now has to raise a little boy alone. When Ryann met Larry, he was already in the National Guard, but later joined the Army reserves. She was prepared that she was going to be the wife of a soldier, if only a civilian soldier. In the several times I spoke to Ryann, I never heard a trace of anger or regret. "I'm a firm believer that Larry was in Iraq because of 9/11," she told me firmly. " I have NEVER felt this was not our war". She pauses, playing with the I LOVE YOU bracelet. "I know Larry was there for a reason." Larry's colleague at the post office, Jimmy Page, echoes this, too, as he shows me around the post office which has set up a tribute to Larry, a window with a photograph of him in his uniform and a sign that says: WE SHALL NEVER FORGET "When he re-enlisted after 9/11, he felt he had to do it," Jimmy says. "He had a calling." The only thing that does make Ryann angry is the fact that Nicholas will grow up without a father. Watching TV one day, the child caught part of Ronnie Regan's elaborate funeral. He suddenly turned to his mother and said, "Daddy's not coming back." "That," Ryann says later, trying to supervise her own kids and her sister's kids and some neighbourhood kids for a backyard barbecue, "Hurt the most." *** I spoke to fathers of other soldiers from Westbrook in Iraq and I spoke to people over lunch – lobster rolls, the local speciality – at Olivia's Diner on Brown Street. I spoke to shop keepers and people walking their dogs. People genuinely felt Larry's death, but everyone supported him. No one said, "George Bush got us into this war, and it's a mess!" as I expected. Oddly enough, the only vocal opponent to the war in Iraq was Larry's grandmother, Mitzi Rumo – always called Nan – who is 84. Mitzi is a strong, handsome woman whose roots go far back in Maine. "When I was growing up, everyone helped everyone and if you needed anything, you went to your neighbours." She's a devout Irish Catholic who wears the medallion of Our Lady around her neck, and goes to mass every day at St. Josephs, where Larry was married and where his funeral mass was celebrated. After 8 a.m. mass, she always goes out to breakfast with friends, and I meet her at the Dunkin Donuts in Westbrook early one morning. Nan says she raised Larry when he was little, and she is furious with the White House for taking him away from her. "I believe Bush went into Iraq with a vendetta and he didn't need to go there," she says firmly, clutching her paper coffee cup. Then her eyes fill with tears. "He was such a good, good boy!" she says. "He was my pride and joy!" It's a simple statement, nothing unusual, but hearing her say it is heartbreaking. I can not imagine a mother, or a grandmother, sending her son off to war. Nan reminds me gently it is not the natural order of things to have a grandson die before you. And although she is fit and healthy, there is such a veil of sadness around Nan at the loss of her pride and joy, that when she drives off in her car, emblazoned with a yellow ribbon and bumper stickers supporting our troops, I almost feel that sadness lift. *** What happens when someone dies in a desert far, far away from the rocky coast of Maine? At first, everyone feels it, everyone helps. People fixed Betsy Coffin's car for free, and the local accountant refused to take money to fill in her tax forms. The engraver of Chris Gelineau's headstone refused to take a cheque from his widow, Lavinia. People put a flagpole up in Ryann Roukey's front yard, and soon it will have a light that stays on all the time, in memory of Larry. There were parades all over Maine for the Fallen Heroes. Then, even if the widow has a lot of community support, she is eventually left alone with the terrible knowledge that her beloved is not coming back. To cope, Lavinia Geleneau and Betsy Coffin both keep their husband's voices on their telephone answer machine. Both describe the terrible void they feel, and Lavinia sends me an email with a quote from Emily Dickinson "Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." Betsy Coffin, who keeps her email sign-on "Betsy and Chris Coffin" is on a slightly different quest: she wants the truth from the U.S. Government. She was never really satisfied with the story the Army gave her – that Chris' Humvee swerved off the road to avoid an oncoming vehicle on the road to Kuwait – so she began to dig around to find out what happened, to demand answers from high-level Army officials, to prod all of her Army contacts. "I became an annoyance," she admits grimly. She waited eight months to find out what happened, and then she began to do her own investigation. She loved Chris too much to just let him go without knowing how he died, who he was with, and if he was in pain at the last minute. After Chris left, she kept finding notes he had hidden all over the house: "Dearest Bets – Right this minute, I'm thinking of you, and smiling." He also left a prayer for her:
This is why she wanted to know how he died – they were too close for her to live with a lie. And the more she dug, the more she learned of his last moments: that it probably was not an accident, but an ambush; that a crowd of Iraqis surrounded the vehicles and a soldier had to fire his gun to keep them at bay; that one of the soldiers there later told Betsy that "it was worse than Somalia" and that Chris's watch and wedding ring – something he treasured – were stolen. This pains Betsy the most. There are other things that haunt Betsy. Chris called Betsy every day on the cell phone that she bought when he left for Iraq and he was the only person she gave the number to. The night before he died, she waited and waited for his call to come from Kuwait to say he arrived safely. It never came. Betsy says she "Waited and waited and after three days, I turned it off". She still doesn't have the heart to turn it back on. . In the aftermath of death, there is a deathly quiet. After the military funerals, the flags flying low, the yellow ribbons, the neighbours bearing endless casserole dishes for supper, there is an awful calm. The last night I drive through Westbrook, seeing Everytown USA: there is the Mc Donalds and there is the local grammar school and there are all the backyard barbecues and fathers grilling hot dogs and mothers passing out bowls of potato salad. Except with the death of Larry Roukey, Westbrook is forever scarred. One more brick in the memorial in the park by the river, and now Iraq has come to hometown America. A few days after the anniversary of Chris Coffin's death, Betsy Coffin sent me an email. She was back at work in a local hospital after staying with family for Chris's year anniversary, but the pain wasn't getting any better. When I spoke to her, she sounded strong but wounded. Chris had been her life and her love, and she still wore her engagement, wedding and three diamond ring – which Chris had given her and which symbolised the past, present and future. But that ring now was also cruel reminder. The present was not great; the future seemed bleak; and as for the past, Betsy was haunted by the fact that both she and Chris had an eerie feeling all along about him going away. Fear. But she wanted to clarify something about that, about their fear:
© Janine di Giovanni |
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