Freedom Friday HOMECOMINGS

I am going to talk about something that has been on my mind a lot lately. Something I have only experienced as an "outsider", a "friend", a "Marine Family Member" and that is losing your spouse while deployed. My husband has many deployments under his belt and probably one or two still left in our near future. As spouses when we send our husbands (I will refer to husbands since that is my frame of reference) we do so with the wonderful anticipation of the "homecoming". We think about it from the moment our eyes can no longer see one another as they leave on the plane, bus, car or however that moment comes. It is as much a part of us as breathing those months/year waiting for them to come home. It is such an emotional time that unless you have experienced it you could never really understand how many layers of emotions are involved. During the deployments when your husbands Battalion takes casulties you feel like a member of your family has died and you worry, you worry everyday and you think of the homecoming because it gets you through every memorial service you attend while they are gone. When you sit there in your chair crying hysterically for the lose of one of your own, but not really "your" own, you mind tells you how easily it could have been your husband, how the pain you feel is deep but can't touch how it must really feel. Everytime the news reports a death of a Marine/Soldier you stop in your tracks to hear the "who,what when and where" because we all know the media finds out before we do. And again, we start thinking about the homecoming.
Here is what I dwell on when my husband is deployed. I try not to go to this place often because it is dark and scary but inevitable. "If I lost him while he was over there, would I continue to wait for the homecoming?" Would it be a perpetual feeling of waiting? I have heard other spouses explain it like that, and to me that is the worse kind of way to have to grieve. I know our lives are so unigue and we deal with things most never do. But still we wait...and still we hope, that we all get our "Happy Homecoming"
Special thanks to Nadine for posting a great video today on her blog about homecomings to remind me of how lucky I have been to always have a happy ending.