I came home from my morning walk with the dog to a message on the voicemail. It was my husband Frank, calling from his office on board Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune -- his new unit would leave before dawn in less than two days.

This was years ago, and Frank just returned from Afghanistan. Now he was headed to Iraq. For three weeks I would drink in every minute together and wonder how many minutes were left. After being in limbo, I had thought it would be a relief to have a date. It was. But the disbelief that it was really happening was breathtaking.

I didn't know very many people there in North Carolina. I knew none of the wives in Frank's new unit. So while I fought tears and the realization that my husband would soon be gone, I packed up the house to flee to my sister's house in Richmond.

That afternoon, Frank came home and laid his head on my lap, and watched something I wasn't very interested in. Then I noticed his eyes were closed. "Are you falling asleep?" I asked. I was darned if I was going to sit there and watch something I didn't want to watch while he slept through it.

"Wake me up in 20 minutes," he mumbled, which really annoyed me because he always sets an alarm for 20 more minutes, or asks me to wake him up and then all he does is groan and reset the alarm or ask me to come back later. Two decades ago, when I first started waking up with him, I woke up to four different alarms going off at five-minute intervals all around the room, which he'd set the night before to ensure that he got up.

Now I snapped, "Why don't you just set the alarm for an hour or two and be done with it? That way you'd at least get a nice long uninterrupted stretch of sleep instead of torturing yourself and me along with you." Then I got moving, which is how I cope, loading boxes into his truck. When I woke him 20 minutes later, sure enough, he groaned and set his alarm and I stomped out the door, off to hurl the boxes into a rented storage unit.

Two hours later we fought over who'd get to write the final draft of a move-out letter we had to give our landlady.

"I'm writing it," I insisted.

"But you got to write the last draft."

"Because you got to write the first and second drafts." My voice was cold and hard. "I should get to write this one, too."

I was typing furiously when he touched my arm and said, "I'm sorry."

I melted. I was sorry, too. It was so petty to fight over a stupid letter when we had so little time left. "I guess," I confessed, "I just want to control... something."

Unbeknownst to me, I'd just gone through most of the classic emotional phases of predeployment -- disbelief, grief, and irritability which keeps your spouse at arm's length and makes it easier to say goodbye -- but instead of spreading the phases out over a couple of months, I'd compressed them all into six hours.

Now I felt close to him again, the way I'd felt for the past three weeks, except not quite. There was an edge that hadn't been there before. For the rest of that day we swayed our way along that edge, Frank tipping between sweetly funny and distractedly abrupt, I between loving understanding and self-pitying irritation.

I have since found a list of the standard emotional phases spouses experience during deployment in a handbook for Marine Corps spouses. It's based on the work of Kathleen Vestal Logan, a marriage and family counselor and former naval officer. A textbook worst-case scenario for the predeployment period may look like this:

• Spouse gets the word about deployment and enters the Anticipation of Loss Phase, during which spouse can't believe it's really going to happen.
  
• Spouse either ignores the news and goes on as if nothing has changed, or denies reality. For example, the spouse will imagine that the boat or plane will break and they'll call it all off, or that if he or she breaks own leg and is unable to get around with the baby while on crutches, the military will say to their significant other, "Gee, why don't you stay home and help your gimpy spouse." This is a fantasy.
  
• Spouse eventually accepts reality and decides garage reorganization project begun two years ago absolutely must be finished before departure date.
  
• Spouse also surprises self at least once by bursting into tears at some inappropriate moment, say, while standing in line at the credit union.
  
• Spouse is pissed off at the military for deploying people, and pissed off at significant other for joining the military in the first place. Increased tension leads to increased arguing.
  
• Spouse doesn't feel like being in the same room with that jerk, much less like having sex with him or her.

As the deployment date looms, the Detachment and Withdrawal Phase begins. Spouse feels like the marriage is out of control. Spouse despairs, finds it hard to make decisions, and withdraws emotionally which, not coincidentally, makes it easier to say goodbye when the significant other finally leaves.

This is usually not funny until you look back on it. Then you either laugh or cry, and laughing is a lot more bearable. Different people in different circumstances experience these phases to different degrees, and not necessarily in the same order. A few don't really experience them at all. But if a spouse knows that all of this may be coming, he or she is better equipped to deal with the turmoil if it does.