There is a certain point in your 20s when you become an adult, if you haven’t done so already. Not turning 21, not graduating from school. Some event–an arrest, a disaster, a revelation, getting fired, getting humbled, getting an abortion, or some other legitimate voyage out of your well-traveled comfort zone. Nobody actually told me that when I started my 20s, and I didn’t know it was coming until years after it had passed and left a scar I trace with my memory every day. I thought the world would always be mine, along with everyone I loved in it. I was wrong.
In short: my ex-boyfriend was killed in the war. I don’t know how else to put it, and I’ve tried different ways of phrasing it to make it sound less blunt, but it’s difficult. He was my first love and first true despair, he was the best person I knew and, for very a brief period of time, the worst. I toyed with his heart; I drove him crazy. He was the most significant figure in my life, the most pivotal. He was handsome, Tom Cruise-short, and always tan. In high school, he won Best Smile, but it was never a contest. His football coach talked about him with superlatives usually reserved for the pros. He was lazy and devastatingly smart; he loved Coke and plain white t-shirts. He was the first boy to see something electric in me, an electricity he desired.
We dated and broke up, reconnected and flirted and separated. Our relationship was composed of letters, chance IMs, long-distance phone calls (paid for with actual phone cards), breaks from school when I’d go over to his house and watch movies in his basement and, depending on the status of our relationship at the moment, graze knees. It was all incredibly chaste and suggestive, the way relationships at that age in a very Christian town can be. When he died, we hadn’t spoken in weeks, hadn’t formally dated in years. But I was broken in two.
His name was Luke, and until my junior year in high school, I had never really known him. He was a year older than I was; we’d gone to the same middle school, where he’d been popular in the way only confident, charismatic boys can be.
I was taking chemistry from one of the most committed misogynists in the school district–a brilliant teacher with a lecherous streak, who routinely remarked how pleasant it was to have cheerleaders (just me) in his class on game days (the days I wore short polyester skirts). The first day of class, I’d tried to arrange myself in a way so as to obtain a low-stress lab partner: someone who’d let me dominate everything and get us an A, the way I was used to handling group work. Everything was set, but then Luke, Mr. High School, walked into class five minutes late and took the only open desk right beside me. Mr. Misogyny put us together. I was terrified.
Luke was dating this hot–gorgeous–sophomore. She had long, pendulous hair and was good at volleyball, the way those type of girls are. Over the course of the year, I learned that he was smart, even though he spent most of his days dozing through the first fifteen minutes of class, placing his gum on his hat for safekeeping. We argued, we almost-flirted, we got As. When we did computer modeling, I drew a picture of him with some rudimentary painting program, featuring the only shirt of his that wasn’t white. He took it home and showed it to his mother, who folded it away for safekeeping until showing it to me nearly a decade later.
In my hometown, we take senior pictures, and we do them up right. We’re talking portfolios with six to ten shots, with at least one posed with your favorite symbol of recreation: a football, a cheerleading uniform, your gun, your truck, your baby. You ordered hundreds of wallet-size prints and inscribed them personally; it was like having business cards, only more important. Luke was a “rep” for one of the local photographers, which is just another way of saying that he was good-looking and popular, and his pictures were simple and excellent, the way pictures of people who need no adornment always are.
In the one he gave me, he’s wearing jeans and a white t-shirt and sitting on a stoop; his inscription was witty and brief and the best thing I’d received all year. He graduated and went off to the Virginia Military Institute, possibly the most surprising thing anyone from Northern Idaho has ever done. I went to France for the summer (possibly the second most surprising thing anyone from Northern Idaho has ever done) and settled in for senior year. It was just a friendship, and then it was over.
Until winter, when it wasn’t. The freshman year at VMI, endearingly dubbed the “Rat Year,” is a mix of physical and psychological hazing, characterized by very little access to worldly pleasures and a lot of elbow-crawling through the mud. There was, however, even in 1999, email access, which led to VERY DEEP exchanges via dial-up modem. He told me how his mentor would occasionally let him sit in his room and listen to music, usually verboten for first-years, and how he’d found himself growing addicted to Fiona Apple’s Tidal. This I could get behind.
A long-distance phone conversation or two, a vacation from school, a late night considering whether or not we’d make out. It was all very stressful and delicious. He loved the way I made chocolate chip cookies, the fights we’d have over feminism, my general willfulness and my committed notion that I’d be able to hold a conversation with his father, a highly learned man who verbally decimated any girls that Luke and his brothers brought home. It’s not that his father was mean, exactly; it was that he had exacting standards, which is part of the reason Luke was the person he was.
After plenty of dithering, he convinced me to come over and meet the family. I wore a pair of khaki shorts and a light blue V-neck tank top, both from the Gap, because it was 1999 and that was how you looked nice. I got pushed in the pool and roundly teased and treated to an inquisition, which is another way of saying that I won the family over. I still found it hard to believe all of this was happening to me: I was a cheerleader without a boyfriend or a prom date, a status one of my male friends attributed to my status as a “ball buster,” which is Idaho shorthand for “a girl who talks in class.” Suddenly, the world was rotating my way.
There were perfect days in July. He had two brothers and a kid sister, a discerning father and an indulgent mother. There were friends spiraling out to all corners of the back patio, endless supplies of burgers and chips (never beer; Luke’s family was not that kind of family). All the boys played football and had the physique unique to 17-year-old boys: lean, muscular, and completely effortless. When the sun went down we’d pile in the back of a truck and go to the video store, something ridiculous like Tim McGraw’s “Indian Outlaw” playing loud enough for everyone to hear, and pick out something horrible. After the movie, Luke would walk me to out to my car for a long goodbye, charged with the electricity of waiting all night for him to touch me. Sleep (very little); Work (horrible); Repeat.
Was he my boyfriend? Maybe. Yes. But then he went to boot camp in Oklahoma while I spent the summer working at the bagel shop. I wrote to him every day, and he replied the way a hero in a Nicholas Sparks novel would: every day, on small squares of lined paper, in a skinny, distinctive scrawl. The way he missed me was encoded in his descriptions of the calls of the drill sergeants, the hunger of the early morning. My mom watched the envelopes arrive with a mixture of bemusement and concern.
*
Our relationship fell apart, then reconstructed itself. In 2013, things might have been different. In 1999, we had IM and a once-weekly phone call. Eighteen-year-olds love too much to be contained in so little. By Christmas, we were officially split, but still spent every day we were both in town together. And so every break went for the next four years: I’d make fun of his new girlfriends, I’d force him to see better movies, I’d tease him with a confidence I lacked elsewhere. Sometimes there was a spark that we cultivated, other times one or the other us blew it out. But no one else’s opinion mattered more.
Always, we’d write. At this point he was spending the bulk of his breaks in one rigorous training program or another. Scuba, Ranger, Airborne–I don’t know the official names; all I know is how he’d laminate my letters and take them into the field. It gave me a sense of significance that few other things could, then or since. When I was studying abroad in France, he spent his spring break in Bermuda, drinking hard and breaking rules like military guys on vacation do. One night he got separated from the rest of his group, hopped some walls, shimmied up a balcony, made his way back into the hotel without a key, and wrote me a letter in Red Sharpie on the back pages of Gideon’s Bible: “I do love you, Annie. I guess I always will.”
He folded the letter and sealed the envelope so he wouldn’t wake up in the morning and think twice. It was the first and the last time he said it.
*
Luke graduated from VMI and was stationed in the North Korean DMZ. So far, so (relatively) good. Before leaving Stateside, he sent me a thick, mysterious parcel. I was excited at first, but then, immediately terrified: it was five years’ worth of my letters, at least 200 in total, except for a few that had disintegrated in his pocket and one I’d written in anger. They were mine for safekeeping; they were mine to reread, to marvel and despair at. I had no way of tethering my heart to his own.
Then he was in Iraq, growing a mustache because that’s what you did to look less Western, sending back pictures of himself standing in front of the crumbling, whitewashed, ornate backdrop of a regime in decline.
People still understand what it meant to be in Fallujah in the fall of 2004. That’s where Luke was when he was killed by a stray IED, volunteering to take another soldier’s place on a security round. His brother sent an email in the early morning hours.
I was working as a nanny at the time; even if I hadn’t been in shock, I couldn’t have called in sick. I went to work and clung to that baby, weeping through his naps, tears streaming down my face as I pushed him around the block over and over again. That afternoon, I managed to tell the parents I worked for that I needed to go home to Idaho. My ex-boyfriend–my best friend–had been killed in Iraq, I told them. It was the first time I’d felt the shock of the words in my mouth.
What followed was a week of sleeplessness and alcohol and sitting in Luke’s house, surrounded by memories, barely holding my body together. His sister had a one-year-old son, and his face looked so much like Luke’s I wanted to stare at him forever, or never again. The only thing that seemed to help was collecting passages from our letters, photos, snippets of lyrics from CD liner notes, and compiling them in a notebook to give to his parents, evidence of the soft heart of their hard-edged boy. I left out the most embarrassing parts, left in the most revealing ones–the parts where he talked with plain reverence about his father, the way he described the clean lines of his spartan life at VMI, the closest he got to purple prose in his appreciation for Pearl Jam’s Ten.
There was a burial at Arlington Cemetery in the rain; I still felt so absent from my body that I couldn’t hold two thoughts in my head at once. On the cross-country flight back I had a full row to myself, and I lay prone and stared straight ahead, unable to sleep, addicted to my own grief.
The thick sorrow would lift over the next few months, but I started dreaming–deep, involved dreams–almost always featuring his entire family, Luke always alive, but leaving soon. I’d wake up crying, which, if you’ve never experienced it, is the strangest of sensations, the physical crossover from the subconscious to the conscious. Nearly ten years later, I still have these dreams, waking up exhausted and low, not because of some new realization that he’s gone, but because in the dream, he was not.
I’m still friends with his family, and have watched as they’ve had more kids, all of whom look like Luke, and named them, in various fashions, after him. I’ve seen myself grow older than his forever 24 years, and wonder what he’d tease me about now, what his children would look like, whether his handwriting would be the same and whether he could still pull a “gainer” on his parents’ diving board, how much he’d hate Facebook and the fights we’d have over politics and the war, how his face would age but his smile would not. Apart from my parents, I have so little left for me in my hometown: he was always the reason for the return. Without him, I sleep too much.
I realize that I am one of thousands who have been forced to bear this type of loss. Which is part of what makes my story feel singular, even when it is not. But it’s still difficult to explain: at one point in the weeks after Luke’s death, someone, thinking I was out of earshot, asked a friend why I was so upset–it’s not like I was his girlfriend.
Truth. It was more.
*
Luke intermittently loved and mostly hated poetry. I’d send him poem after poem, hoping to land on one he’d like. There was Archilochos, from the 7th century B.C., and a bit of Frost, but there was also a fragment of Longfellow–one he never admitted to loving, but which I found well-creased and battered in the packet of letters he sent me.
I don’t know how to end this story, because it’s a story that doesn’t end. But this is as good of a placeholder as any in a life that lives on vividly, inextricable from my own.
There are things of which I may not speak;
There are dreams that cannot die;
There are thoughts that make the strong heart weak,
And bring a pallor into the cheek,
And a mist before the eye.
And the words of that fatal song
Come over me like a chill:
‘A boy’s will is the wind’s will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.’
Image courtesy of colleen_taugher via Flickr.
Tags: anne helen petersen, personal narrative, relationships, tragedies, war
What a piece of writing. This is beautiful.
this is heart-wreching and I am crying at my desk. thank you for sharing.
This is beautiful. Such a perfect description of what it’s like to lose someone.
If I wasn’t at work, I’d be crying my eyes out.
I am at work, and I am crying my eyes out. Luckily, everyone else is on vacation.
Don’t worry, I am crying at work in a serious way for you.
I’m sitting at my desk fighting back tears. This was beautiful and heart-wrenching and thank you for writing.
That you for sharing that, AHP. This is hearbreaking and gorgeous and like those who commented above, I am fighting back tears at my desk.
“Apart from my parents, I have so little left for me in my hometown: he was always the reason for the return. Without him, I sleep too much.”
Oh. Tears.
Oh, Anne. No wonder he kept all your letters.
Thank you for sharing. This is lovely and real and both singular and universal.
“I still have these dreams, waking up exhausted and low, not because of some new realization that he’s gone, but because in the dream, he was not.”
I have these about my dad. Thank you for putting into words what they do to me.
” Without him, I sleep too much.”
Oh, AHP. This is lovely and heartbreaking. Thank you.
Just devastating AHP. Thank you for sharing.
This is so beautiful and sad and poignant. Thank you AHP
Oh, Anne, this was beautiful. I’m so sorry.
This is perfect and heart shattering and so true about life. Thank you for sharing it here
This was so beautiful. Im so happy for you that you knew him, and Im so sorry for your loss.
I started having those dreams about my mother two days after she died, and I’ve been having them regularly for eight years. I’m relieved to see that experience mirrored in somebody else, as devastating as I know it to be.
I have them regularly about my mother (after three years) and occasionally about my stepmother (nine years). It’s a gift that is also a burden. The ones that hurt the most, for me, are the ones where my mother and I argue or get annoyed with each other over some minor thing; with her long illness and death, it’s been a decade since I’ve had the luxury of just being pissed at my mother. Waking up erases that anger and replaces it with a much worse one.
And Anne, this is so lovely. Thank you for writing this.
I know exactly what you mean. In my dreams, my mother is always frustrated with me, and trying to make me see how much better things would be if I just did everything her way. Which is just what she would be doing if she were alive. I love that and it breaks my heart.
This is beautiful, and I’m sorry for your pain, and I’m glad of these perfectly observed thoughts amongst the levity of the other articles.
Oh Anne, I love you even more. I didn’t think it could be possible, but I do. You are so wonderful, and my heart breaks for you.
What a wonderful personal narrative for July 4th. I think this is what the day should be about! I am glad you have your letters and his.
“his face would age but his smile would not.” Thank you for sharing yourself and your love with us. Thank you!
Oh, gosh. This is so sad and beautiful, and I’m so sorry for your loss.
I almost wish this was on the Hairpin so you would be getting hundreds of comments of support, but instead I’ll just add mine. This was beautiful, and I’m so sorry.
Beautiful, true, crying crying crying. Thank god for AHP, and frankness, and terrible beauty. I’m so, so sorry. And I’d say I wish I could buy you a drink, but that’s more appropriate for stories about Clark Gable and Lana Turner. There’s more than drinks necessary for this. Thank you for witnessing; thank you for writing.
This was so powerful – I’ve never read anything quite like this. Thank you for sharing your experience and memories, especially today. I’ve been an avid follower of you on the hairpin and can’t wait to read your book.
Oh, Anne. I get it. My lifelong friend – literally lifelong; he was one year younger than me, his brother and I are two weeks apart in age, and our dad were best friends before they even met our mothers – passed away a few days before his 21st birthday, in a car accident. I had just turned 22 and started my first ‘real’ full time job. These kind of experiences do make you an adult and it’s hard to explain to people who haven’t experienced this kind of grief or loss. But you wrote your story-without-end beautifully. Thank you for sharing that poem too.
I still dream about my friend; usually when I do, I take it as a sign he’s around and happy, wanting to let me know he’s ok. I don’t usually wake low but I do wake crying and happy and exhausted all at once. I can feel him around me in daily life too. Hugs to you.
Thanks, Anne, for sharing. I hate that he’s not here, and that you and his family went through what you went through. But thanks for sharing it and making it a part of us.
This is a truly beautiful thing, thank you so much.
This made my eyeballs, very, very sweaty.
But seriously, this is such an emotionally complex situation and you’ve been so brave to share it – even though it is heart-rending, I thank you.
Oh Anne that was beautiful and awful. I’m crying those hot involuntary tears you get when something touches a deep true thing in you.
I have those dreams about my dad sometimes. Usually I realise halfway through that he shouldn’t be there because he’s not alive. Occasionally I’ll get in a quick dream-hug before the unreality of it wakes me up.
I liked (not quite the right word) that you didn’t end your story. There isn’t an end, grief only changes it’s not over. There are always new things that they are missing out on.
Thank you so much for sharing.
I don’t know how to respond beyond what others have already said, so I’ll just say thank you to Anne, to Mallory, to Nicole.
Heartbreaking. What a gift you have with words.
“your gun, your truck, your baby”- I grew up on North Idaho too, I can relate to this
powerful and touching.
I’m so sorry for your loss. This was very touching. I experienced something similar, the first love of my life died ten years ago. I always thought we’d end up getting married someday. When he died we weren’t even in touch and I didn’t know his family, so I had nobody to grieve with. I still dream about him too, and I still feel weird explaining to people the impact this death had on me.
Hugs to you.
My first big love died in a motorcycle accident just last month. We weren’t in touch and I’m not in touch with his family either – I left town and he and his brothers were still in Minneapolis. I didn’t really have anyone to grieve with either and also felt very weird about how much of an impact his death had. (So very) thankfully, my family – especially my little sister – got it. Probably almost more than I did at the time.
Basically I am saying that I feel you and hugs to *you.*
What an amazing story! I would love to know if you have family or moved on from this intense and beautiful relationship?
Oh, Anne. Thank you so much for writing this and sharing it with us. I feel I know your friend now, because your description is so perfect.
This was beautiful. I’m in my mid-twenties and haven’t reached that certain point yet, but I’ve watched my friends go through awful, awful things and I am so proud of them (and you) for continuing to stand up and move forward and be the best people they can be, even though it’s hard sometimes. I hope I handle whatever gets thrown at me with half the grace they have.
I imagine writing this was not an easy decision. The death of someone central does indeed bring adulthood in awful fashion, but describing it to others always seems to fall short. Your effort here is about as close as you can get to keeping something scared while sharing it with the world.
Echoing the comments above: so heartbreaking, so well-written. Thank you for sharing.
25 yrs after my best friend died in a canoe accident I have the same.
Just with less edge.
Lovely words, Anne
Jesus, Anne. Give a man a fair warning! Now I have to go into work all red eyed and convince them I’m not high. This is a wonderful piece, and a hard one to write emotionally, yes, but as a writer I know that these types of personal narratives can also be a nightmare to construct. You did it beautifully. I hope you got out of it as much of it as we, your readers did.
I love your intro, for some reason it reminds me of that Ted Hughes letter, “Live like a mighty river.” Looking forward to reading more from you 🙂
I just want to add my voice to the chorus. This was beautiful, and thank you for sharing.
This is the most beautiful thing that I’ve read all year.
I read an awful lot.
Just beautiful. Thank you for sharing it with us.
` “I’ve seen myself grow older than his forever 24 years,”
Oh, god, yes, that’s the worst thing, the growing older than their forever…
Thank you so much, AHP, for putting it into words. Further, I think we are probably all more closely connected to those wars than we know or want to admit- I know several people with dear childhood friends, first kisses, family friends that have been killed in the war. And no, they weren’t “his girlfriend” but who said being The Girlfriend (maybe The Girlfriend of seven months?) was somehow more real or more grief-inducing than being that childhood friend, the first kiss, the family friend’s son or daughter of your whole life?
Luke lives forever in your beautiful words and in the way you have brought him into so many hearts. As an Army vet, I appreciate so much how you have humanized the devastating losses of these terrible wars. Thank you.
Thank you so much for sharing this beautiful, heartbreaking story. It really hit me in the gut; and you’re right, waking up crying is a truly disconcerting experience.
So living, so beautifully storten. Thank you AHP. Thank you for sharing. And the tears.
This could be my story, except that my feax-bf is still alive and serving. Makes me think I should actually tell him how I feel….OMG it is creepy how similar our relationships seem to be,
Oh, Anne.
Oh Anne. I had a relationship exactly like this. Down to the chasteness and the folded and re-folded letters and the long-distance calls and the spark that was always there, encouraged or snuffed out depending on timing. Mine is alive and quite well with his family, 10 years since the last time I saw him and we snuffed that spark out for good. And though I’ve always carried what I thought was a little grief for him and our lost relationship, after reading this I know that it’s not grief at all but just love. Just a little love still. And now I feel damn lucky that I get to know that he is out there. And I’m just so sorry about Luke. I’m so sorry, Anne. Thank you for writing this.
Yes. I get this completely. He was my sometimes-boyfriend and my occasional enemy and my best friend; the only person I’ve ever met who could finish my sentences. Every time I went home, he was my every day. I remember once he called me when he came home for Christmas–he hadn’t even been upstairs to see the Christmas tree yet. He just called me as soon as he walked in the door. He has a wife and a child and we haven’t spoken in 8 years, and I really, really hope that he’s happy and well. And I don’t know if I want him in my life because I’m 30 now and I’m too practical for that kind of tortured romance, and maybe it wouldn’t be the same, and I don’t know if there’s room for someone so huge in my life, and I don’t know if there’s room for me in his, but now I know that I was right when I said that I would always love him. And it’s nice to know, because he said it first, so now I know that he was right, too.
This was so good, AHP. This is such a painful experience, but you wrote it so beautifully.
Anne, thank you so much for sharing, and this is such an incredibly brave and beautiful story. I love the details about growing up in rural Idaho–not so far off from growing up in the rural South! I found myself nodding along and smiling even though I knew what was coming. I’m so sorry for your loss, more than I can express. This touched me in a very deep place.
I would love this even if I wasn’t a girl who talked in class and even if I didn’t spend my holiday weekends on Lower Twin and even if I hadn’t recently discovered dead boyfriends #4 and #5. My deepest sympathies to you for this terrible loss.
What an incredibly beautiful, thoughtfully constructed piece. Thank you.
“at one point in the weeks after Luke’s death, someone, thinking I was out of earshot, asked a friend why I was so upset–it’s not like I was his girlfriend.
Truth. It was more. ”
Yeah… Truth, it was more… How do you explain a relationship that is way more??
:tears: Thank you, Anne. I’m so sorry for your loss!
"at one point in the weeks after Luke’s death, someone, thinking I was out of earshot, asked a friend why I was so upset–it’s not like I was his girlfriend.
Truth. It was more. "
Yeah… Truth, it was more… How do you explain a relationship that is way more??
:tears: Thank you, Anne. I'm so sorry for your loss!
this is truly beautiful. thank you.
“I don’t know how to end this story, because it’s a story that doesn’t end.” Thanks for acknowledging that both our grief and our love is eternal. Much love to you, AHP.
Ow, this was painful and moving and beautiful. I can’t imagine losing someone like this, especially not so young.
Oh, this makes my heart ache. I’ve never been to Idaho, but you paint it clearly. My thoughts keep lingering back to that poem and to the final paratraphs where and my heart tightens, too full.
I don’t know you and you don’t know me – but we share the same story – different man, different death, different details, but same kind of love, same kind of loss, same kind of difficulty finding the validity to grieve a relationship that to the outside world was “never there” but to those on the inside and to those two people in the center of it – it was Very real. I too struggled with the statement “but they weren’t even dating” as my life drastically fell apart… My friend found your blog on the 8th Anniversary of his death – and sent it to me. There could have been nothing more fitting. Thank you for sharing!
Wow.
This was such a well-written piece on grief. Thank you for sharing.
This is amazing and also startling – my own ex-boyfriend was at the same military school at the same time, and we were having the same relationship. Mine is still alive, as far as I know, but could so so easily have been Luke I’m terrified to even scan Facebook looking for him, because I can imagine the pain if he wasn’t. I have a crazy desire to ask him if he knew your Luke. Thank you for this beautiful piece of writing.
My dear Anne,
I read down to the very last drop….weeping. If you are ever in Northern Virginia please look us up. Our son Luke is named after Luke. My husband Clayton served with him in the 506. Hopefully, Dean will be coming to see us next year for the Currahee reunion. xo, Heather