They Lost Him Twice
They Lost Him Twice
Most people picture one loss. For a widow of a veteran who died by suicide, there were two.
The first happened at the homecoming, which is the part nobody expects. There were photographs. There was relief. Everyone exhaled and said the hard part was over. And then, slowly, she began to understand that the man who walked back through the door was not the man who left.
He was there and he was not there. Certain sounds changed the whole evening. She learned to read a room before she entered it, to manage the kids' volume and the schedule and the holidays, all of it, so that he could hold on.
She loved him through it. She loved someone still fighting a war nobody else could see, and she did it without a casualty notification, without a folded flag, without one person bringing a casserole to the door. That was the first loss, and she grieved it alone.
The second came a while
later.
A woman whose husband dies downrange receives a community that knows exactly what to say. A woman whose husband dies by suicide receives silence. People do not know what to say, so they say nothing, and she ends up managing everyone else's discomfort on top of her own devastation. She learns very quickly which rooms she can say his name in, and how he died, without watching someone flinch. And underneath all of it, a question nobody asks out loud but she hears anyway. What could she have done differently.
Both of these women lost their husbands to his service. One loss happened overseas. The other happened in a house, in a neighborhood, after everyone assumed the hard part was over. The mechanism was different. The sacrifice was not.
Then she goes home
The casseroles stopped coming a while ago. The phone calls thinned out, because people mean well and then life pulls them back. And she is standing in a house that is suddenly far too quiet, holding a list of decisions that will not wait.
Sell the house or stay in it. Move closer to family or keep the kids in the only school they know. What to tell them, and how much. The benefits paperwork nobody explained. How to raise these children by herself.
Every one of those gets answered before the only question nobody is asking her. How are you.
So she puts that one at the bottom, because the roof and the school district are real and immediate and her own grief can wait. It can always wait. She has spent her entire adult life being the one who could wait.
And then she says yes to an invitation
She drives up our driveway carrying everything she has been carrying. The first night she is polite and a little guarded, which is exactly right. Somewhere around the second day, in a circle or beside a horse or at a table with her hands busy, she says something true out loud. And she looks up to find that every woman in the room already knows.
Heard. Seen. Held. For many of these women, for the first time since he died.
We do not fix anyone here. We give her four days where nothing is required of her, where she is not the strong one, and where nobody needs anything explained.
How you can send a woman here
We have a waitlist. Not a theoretical one. Names.
We keep these retreats small on purpose, because a woman cannot truly be seen in a room of forty and she can in a room of eight. That is exactly what makes it work, and exactly why the list keeps growing.
Every seat is a sponsorship. We never turn a woman away because she cannot pay, which means somebody else makes it possible. When you sponsor a seat, you are not funding a program. You are sending a specific woman to four days she could not otherwise reach, with her travel, lodging, meals, and materials covered, so the only thing she brings is herself.
Four local Rotary clubs did exactly that this month. Mountaintop Rotary of Highlands, the Rotary Club of Franklin, the Rotary Club of Highlands, and the Rotary Club of Franklin Daybreak came out to the farm and presented sponsorship checks covering this retreat. Because of them, eight women will arrive and never see a bill.
We would like to do that again, and again, until the waitlist is gone.
If you are a widow of suicide loss reading this, please reach out to Jess directly. Not to sign up for anything, and not because you need to be ready. Just so we know your name, and so we can call you first when we open the next offering created for women like you.
Jessica Merritt, 828.222.3105, jessica@speciallibertyproject.org
If you or someone you love is struggling, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available 24 hours a day. Call or text 988. Veterans and their families can press 1.
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