They are the entire evidentiary record of a person she is related to and does not remember.
Take them down and she does not become less sad.
She becomes less sure the person existed.
I did not manage those five years well.
I want that written down plainly, because there is a version of this story where I am the vigilant father who caught it, and that version is a lie.
I went back to work eight weeks after my wife’s funeral because the alternative was staying in the house.
I was in command of a battalion two years later, which meant seventy-hour weeks and a phone that did not go off, and I told myself the whole time that providing stability was the same thing as providing presence.
Samantha moved from Pueblo to Colorado Springs in the second year.
She has never once framed that as a sacrifice and it obviously was one.
And I was, by year four, extremely lonely in a way I had never admitted to a single human being — not to my sister, not to a chaplain, not to the behavioral health people whose services I have since recommended to eleven soldiers under my command and never once used myself.
There is one night from that summer that I have to put in here, because everything at the end of this depends on it.
Rebecca died at 4:20 in the afternoon on a Tuesday in July at Memorial Hospital Central.
