I’ve encountered six young military widows this year. The first two are local widows in the process of writing a book. The second two I met at conferences, each wearing her grief like clothing she had slept in and couldn’t change. 

The fifth I was supposed to call for an interview last month. I have three numbers for her. I still haven’t called. I am afraid to call. Surely tomorrow I will feel like calling.

It is probably a good thing then that the sixth widow would not be avoided.  Jennifer Zellem spoke at a training for military wives I attended last week. She was there to tell us the stuff we needed to know in case anything happened “in the command” or “to a friend.”

That was a good way to put it. Organized on a Powerpoint handout, handling the death of a service member seemed like a complicated, sorrowful, yet manageable task. Check off these things to do.Call these people. Scan this website. 

I think that  manageable feeling lasted all of five minutes. The more Jennifer talked about her husband, LCDR Scott Zellem, killed in an S-3 accident not quite two years ago, the more ludicrous the word “manageable” seemed to be. Jennifer never used that word. She never would.

Because Jennifer Zellem knows better than I ever hope to that there is nothing manageable about the death of a service member. There is nothing manageable about being a 25-year-old widow with a 10-month-old baby. Nothing manageable about being a wife one minute and a widow the rest of your life.

We try to make it so. At trainings like this one, experts can detail the simple things we don’t  know that make it easier on a widow or widower and their families. Surely we all  should have some kind of rough outline of where we would like to be buried, who the pall bearers would be, what songs should be played. We all ought to be more certain of our joint bank accounts and whose name the car is under and how our benefits are supposed to work. We all ought to know the kindnesses necessary at a time of tragedy.

That’s the least of it.  The bare minimum.  The prep for an open book test.  So why don’twe even get that done?

I could blame denial — the military wife weapon of choice. Usually, denial is a useful, practical tool. Although our service members are in a dangerous profession, the vast majority of them will leave the military walking on their own two feet.  Spending our every waking minute worrying about the unbearable and the unstoppable isn’t a good use of our time.

But when you meet these widows, so many in a single year, denial doesn’t seem like it is the most effective defense possible.  It seems pathetic. By failing to see ourselves in these young widows we are children pretending that Death can’t see us if we don’t look at it. 

I’m pretty certain this isn’t how Death works. I’m pretty certain that Death takes young men and women along with the old. That in wartime, young widows are less uncommon all the time.

So I’ll attend these trainings. I’ll file away the Powerpoint handout. Take a few notes. But lets all admit that there is no preparation for widowhood. No love for it.  Only the kind of unspeakable grief that knocks you to your knees.