In their own words, Oregon families and neighbors describe the rituals and ceremonies that guide their journey through grief...
Our fallen soldiers
Randy Walker lingered in front of a Pendleton funeral parlor on a gray January day. His youngest son's body was somewhere between Baghdad and home, and the retired police officer had just picked out a casket.
Walker talked about Ryan easily, smiling, recalling stories. How Ryan and his brother rode their shiny new bikes into a soupy cow pond. How they stalked deer and peacocks around their mountain home. But the thing that stuck with me, that set off some deep, unformed reaction, was when he talked about the bonfire.
Jerry Stump, who'd also lost a son in the war, joined Walker. Adrian had died four months earlier when hostile fire brought his Chinook helicopter down in Afghanistan. Jerry talked about waiting to learn the details of his son's death, his feeling of helplessness and how Adrian's body came home in pieces.
Time, it seemed, had only fueled Stump's pain. The baseball cap pulled down tight on his forehead didn't hide the tears that streaked his flushed cheeks. Words caught in his throat, but eventually he described a backpacking trip that would honor Adrian by revisiting some of the family's favorite places.
A bonfire and backpacking trip. They haunted me.
As a photojournalist, I've been around the edges of this war since its beginning. I survived a hostile mob in northwest Pakistan the morning U.S. forces first bombed the Taliban. I spent weeks, homesick and ill, in a Turkish border town waiting for the Iraq war to begin. I felt terror driving through Fallujah a day after insurgents slaughtered American contract workers and hung them from a bridge. I was shaken after learning that Nick Berg, whom I'd seen just before he was taken hostage, had been beheaded.
The birth of my two children pulled me home. I'm thankful that was an option.
So far more than 3,125 Americans have died in Iraq and Afghanistan. Eighty of them have local connections.
We mourned those deaths. Whole communities turned out for the funerals and memorial services. The Oregonian covered every one.
News, by its nature, is reported on deadline, and for journalists, the funeral is often an ending. For the families of the dead, however, the funeral is just a beginning.
What the bonfire and the backpacking trip suggested is that journalists could try to accompany families on the journey that begins with a funeral. We could document what we so seldom witness or truly understand --the ceremonies and rituals survivors create to help them go on.
I started calling Oregon families who'd lost a loved one in the Middle East. They all were willing to talk about a terribly painful experience, and many invited me to the special family events they'd planned. The eight represented here were especially open. I think they welcomed me for a very simple reason: They wanted the world to share in their celebrations of their loved ones.
Nothing is more authentic than the way these families and friends hurt and miss. All differ in their views of war and politics. But all have something in common: a lonely love, so visible and raw that the hardest soul would feel it.
They teach a lesson, too. More than the men and women lost in war belonged to our nation as soldiers, they belonged to moms and dads, wives and husbands, brothers and sisters, grandmas and grandpas. In death, the community remembers them for their service. But they are missed most as brother, dad, son, husband, lover and friend.
Jamie Francis: 503-975-5174
jamiefrancis@news.oregonian.com