It's So Hard To Say Goodbye (Or...That Shakespeare Guy Is Full of It)

There was nothing sweet about the sorrow in this parting.

Michelle and I had about two months notice before I left town, which is plenty of time to prepare. The problem is, putting off preparation is easier than dealing with the emotions that come along with the preparing. In our house, that’s a successful recipe for procrastination. Different people handle significant emotional events differently. One of my coping mechanisms is denial, which made it even harder to sit down and do the practical things that needed to be done. Unfortunately, being unprepared and leaving unfinished business only increases the tension level, which leads to a downward spiral of building stress.

Mentally processing the idea of going to war was an exercise in mental gymnastics. Some of the induced thoughts were actually positive. I felt more impetus to work out. I felt a lot of pride in what I was about to do. I was looking forward to getting to fly my helicopter more. But for each of those positive thoughts came negative ones, in many cases simultaneously. The extra working out is a perfect example - the reason I felt more motivated was that the fact had occurred to me that the odds of me having to literally run for my life in the near future had gone from none at all to ALMOST none. That might be a small increase in odds, but good Lord that's not an easy thought to process. And then there's the possibility of me never coming home at all. Talk about opening a Pandora's box of emotions. Do you spend the effort to delve into that possibility? Do you really want to find out where that hypothetical road leads? Do you live your last days at home like they're really your last? If you do, good luck enjoying them. But what if you don't and they are?

At the end of the day, my approach was to try to strike a balance. Most importantly, I didn't want to put any more pressure on Michelle or myself than the situation already had. The last week I was home was bizarre in a way, though. I wanted so bad to enjoy my time as much as possible, but that pesky building stress made it difficult. Add in the fact that Michelle was feeling the same building stress as I was, and our connection was strained at the time when we both needed it to be the strongest. We both needed to be comforted, but neither of us had the full love tank that we needed to be there for each other. On top of that, the knowledge of the implications of the impending physical separation (if you know what I mean) kept the cauldron of complex emotions swirling. And I’m one of the lucky soldiers who completely trusts his wife. For the average (G.I.) Joe the stories of spousal infidelity during a deployment are frequent enough to introduce doubt into even the most solid of relationships.

When the actual morning came, saying goodbye…well there’s certainly nothing quite like that. I had the distinct feeling that this was the time to say something important. I kept hoping some magic words, some soothing prosaic nugget would come to mind that would ease her fears and mine. Maybe if I were a better man I would have had the right words to say or the intestinal fortitude to say it. But maybe the intensity of the situation forced me to boil away the unimportant and get to the heart of what matters. All I could bring myself to say was that I loved her and would miss her. Anything else would have seemed trite. “Don’t worry about me?” “I’ll be fine?” Those things sound nice, but our relationship’s foundation of honesty wouldn’t allow the empty promises. Maybe something like, “I’m proud of you for the way you’re serving your country by letting me go?” That’s true, but something tells me she didn’t really feel sold on the idea of letting me go at that moment, so that probably wasn’t the time for that. At the end of the day, you have to find out what matters most and stick with that and for me, all the things that matter most are summed up best by that simple expression of commitment. I love her, and that’s really what matters.

The next year will be the hardest of our ten years of marriage, without question. Neither one of us knows how this parting will leave us. Absence might make the heart grow fonder, but at what price? To end where we began (with Shakespeare, of course), where will our relationship be after suffering the slings and arrows of this outrageous fortune we find ourselves trodding through? For all the Army's insensitivity and bent towards the unemotional, they might just have the answer: whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger.