Raw Thoughts of a Military Spouse

Our life is like a revolving door. The large glass circular ones like in the fancy hotels, except there’s nothing fancy about it. The door is constantly moving, whether you want it to or not. Our lives are in motion all the time, it just keeps moving. Moving every 3 years to a new place, making new friends, completely changing our lives over and over again. Our husbands come in and out of that revolving door. Here for a while, gone for a while, forever in and out of our lives. When they’re gone our lives move so slowly. It’s like watching the world pass by in slow motion. There’s always things that will distract us, but eventually the distraction fades and we long again for their presence. Their touch, his strong arms around me, sleeping beside me at night.

The possibility of them never coming home is always there, but we ignore it. We’ve stuffed it so far back into a box and hidden it, so the thought doesn’t cross our minds. We don’t talk about it, we don’t acknowledge it. It will never happen to me, it will never be someone I know. We can’t think about it, if we did our thoughts would keep us hostage. We wouldn’t be able to move through life and keep it together. We don’t always keep it together, we break down. We break down but we pick up the pieces and keep moving, because we have to. But this week we were reminded. It was thrown out of the box and hit me like a slap in the face. This is real, this can happen, it does happen, it has happened. Death is always there, lurking in the shadows, waiting to see if he can make an appearance. He took a friend, a son, a brother, a fiance. We are angry, we are devastated, we are broken.

But we have each other. We are crying together, we support each other, we have a connection that no civilian could ever understand. We are a family. We will never forget those that we’ve lost. We will never stop keeping their memory alive.

Though this life is always filled with the unknown, and is hard beyond belief, I wouldn’t give it up for anything.

R.I.P Dylan Elchin
November 27, 2018

“Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”
John 13:15