Joanne Steen’s husband was a helicopter pilot. When you ask her how long they were married, she says, “Not long enough.”

When you ask again, she says more firmly, “Not. Long. Enough.”

If they had been married 50 years, maybe that still wouldn’t have been long enough. Joanne and Ken met at the Officer’s Club at Oceana when they were both 35. They had a wedding, bought a house, planned to have children. And one ordinary Friday afternoon in 1992, Lt. Ken Steen was killed with six others when the helicopter he was piloting came apart in midair over Lessner Bridge in Virginia Beach, Va.

Joanne doesn’t want that to be the story I write.

“But Joanne, you wrote a book…”

“Coauthored a book,” she interrupts.

“Yeah, you are a *widow * who *coauthored * a book called ‘Military Widow: A Survival Guide.’ You are a *widow * driven to get a counseling degree and start a support group for military widows. Babe, I think that’s the story here.”

But Joanne doesn’t want to be the story. She hardly wants to be in the story. No one does. No one volunteers to suddenly and forever be a military widow. No one wants to walk into a room and be the reminder that good men and women do die young.
 
I can understand that. I can understand that need to protect grief from other people. Yet we live in a time of war. According to Department of Defense statistics, about 45 percent of the 3,000 servicemembers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan in the past five years were married. More widows and widowers walk among us every day. More parents who have lost a child. More families who are taking care of wounded warriors or suffering through the rigors of post traumatic stress disorder.

And still the rest of us keep saying and doing all the wrong things. “I once had an instructor of a course I was taking tell me that she was surprised that I was upset by my husband’s death,” said Joanne. “She told me that when I married into the military I should have been prepared for my husband to die.”

Joanne says that kind of cruel remark is common for widows to hear during their unplanned trip through a living hell. Widows are told that they are still young and pretty and will find someone else. Other people confide in the bereaved that this death or this trauma is part of God’s plan.

It isn’t only the thoughtless things we say that hurt them, we also do stupid things.

Businesses offer a discount to active duty and their family members, but don’t extend the courtesy to widows because widows should be old and in that retired group. Coworkers get impatient when the sight of someone in uniform sparks new tears in a widow — that ain’t good customer service.

“People just want you to feel better,” Joanne said in a recent interview. “I give them the benefit of the doubt. They are trying to be kind.”

How is that kind? To me that smacks of pure ignorance. We don’t bother to find out about what exactly these widows have to go through because we don’t really want to know. We don’t want to know that they often have to fend off inappropriate sexual advances from people they know. We don’t want to hear about relatives and friends who now want to borrow money from the insurance payment. We don’t want to care about ex-wives who ask at the funeral whether they will still be getting child support.

All that is too ugly for us. Too uncomfortable. Too real. We want the bereavement over soon and have widows get on with their lives.

“Our world wants to see happy couples not weepy widows,” said Joanne. “We want to fix their grief or have them fix it. But that grief goes on for a lot longer than the world is willing to tolerate.”

That’s why Joanne Steen and her coauthor Regina Asaro wrote their book. For us. Not only for widows, but for the rest of us -- the Realtors and teachers and secretaries and drycleaners and 7-Eleven clerks and doctors and chaplains and church members and neighbors up the street. The authors and the many widows who shared their insights are all hoping that this book will protect the next wave of widows from a world of hurt. We all need to grasp that the toughest job in the military is not being a military wife. The toughest job is being a military widow.

Joanne Steen welcomes your questions and comments about military widows. Email her at Joanne@militarywidow.com. Find out more about “Military Widows: A Survival Guide” at www.militarywidow.com