Today Might be the Day My Son Dies

You may find this interesting.

When my son returned from his first deployment to Iraq in 2005, I didn’t cry. Even as I watched him walk into the building where we all stood waiting for our soldiers to enter, I didn’t cry. With all the shouts and cries from hundreds of family members giddy with relief and excitement as his unit entered and stood in formation, in the midst of all that, I didn’t cry. Surprising, right? I was probably the only person in that whole place not crying.

I’d flown across the country to his base and waited two days for his unit to arrive. The intense anticipation was shared by all the families. And when it was time to go see him, to finally, finally welcome him home, I felt lightheaded, an almost out of body experience. My emotions were so overwhelming, so huge, that I couldn’t stay with them. It felt like if I did, they’d consume me. So I kept them at arm’s length, and there were no tears that day for my son’s safe homecoming.

Not a conscious decision at all, and of course I was ecstatic, overjoyed beyond compare that he was home, but still…. I remained somewhat disconnected from my emotional experience that past year. I kept it all at a distance, not wanting to feel the true level of intensity those emotions were for me.

Actually? For the year my son was in Iraq I’d probably been not just out of body, but also out of my mind most of the time. Because every day for that year, I ran from the thoughts, and a continuous refrain of Where is he now? Has he been shot, is he hurt… is he dying.. will I sense it if he dies… will I know??’

Along with each of those questions in my mind was a vivid picture of what each would look like if it happened. And ultimately as this all endlessly cycled through my brain over and over again, it became less words or thoughts, but instead was just an embodied experience of yearning to know; ‘Is he safe – Is he alive?’

In truth, I knew he wasn’t safe in any sense of the word. I knew he existed in a place where on some level, he breathed in the possibility of death, and breathed it out again, every single day. And as I contemplated the possibility of his death, on some level, a piece of me died – every single day –  as I wondered if today would be the day my son died.

It’s kind of hard to go through daily life / daily routine stuff with THAT running around in your head.

Later, I learned the emotion weaving through all these thoughts and images was called ‘Anticipatory Grief’.  And like countless other military family members with loved ones deployed, it was a state of being that I became intimately aware of that year.  It would surface every time the doorbell rang, or with the feeling of heightened and terrifying awareness I had when some dark, official car would slow or stop near my home. I would freeze – dreading they were coming to tell me my son had died.

It’s a strange and horribly painful way to exist when your child goes to war. It was sort of like the movie Groundhog Day. Each day I’d wake up from a broken sleep with the same thoughts and images that slammed into my head and heart. They came before I could even open my eyes. As I started my day a second wave would come. ‘How can I act normal today, take care of my other child, go to work, cook, clean, and do… normal life?  How do I get through another day like this?’

Because…well… today?

Today might be the day my son dies.

That is not a normal way to live.  And I could not find any value in the routine of daily life. I was tormented by my inability to turn off my continuous terror and grief. I needed to care for my 7-year-old who deserved so much more than I had to give, and I fell short. Every day. My youngest deserved more than an anxious, irritable, and distracted single mother. So yeah, let’s add some guilt to the mix.

Living far from his base and working alongside civilians all day, most with no connection to the military, I began to feel furious at other people’s expectations and assumptions that I’d just continue as I always had. I was irrationally furious at their ignorance of what it meant to have a child who went to war.

The day to day routines stretched out before me as impossible tasks, because – I’m sorry, there was not room in my brain for normal everyday life. Not with my son in Iraq.

Let me clarify that I never, for one minute, felt that what I was experiencing came even close to what my son was living as his reality. And I was not about to let him know what was going on in my head and distract him from his job. I found a perfect mantra that I borrowed and used constantly to hold me up through my fear and grief: ‘If he’s brave enough to go — I can be brave enough to let him’. Those were the best words I ever heard for this and they worked for me as well as anything could.

There was another thing that happened with unexpected regularity. Not anything I planned, but it became almost ritualistic, and was predictable. Every morning, on my 30-40 minute commute to work, I would cry. Most of the time I really didn’t cry the rest of the day. On the way home at night, again the tears came. These tears were odd to me.  A new type of crying.

Because what happened was I wept. Almost effortlessly, mostly silently. As soon as I dropped off my youngest at school and turned the car out into traffic, the tears would start. A steady nonstop stream down my face. I allowed myself this luxury of grief each day. The commute to and from work. It did not ease anything, fix anything, or make anything worse. It was just what I did, for the entire year. Actually, it was not something I had a choice about. I never planned them, but I came to expect them.

Tears are a funny thing for me in my life. I have never been called a crier; tears did not come easily for me. Before if I cried, it was usually in solitude, infrequent, and definitely not where others could witness my pain.

The funny part (funny being a relative term here) about my changed crying behaviors, is that I can trace this back to the events of September 11^th, 2001.

In June 2001, my son graduated high school and entered Basic Training a few weeks later in July. He signed up for the appeal of being a soldier and money for school stuff. I was proud and terrified. Just having my son enter the Army and choose Infantry for his MOS, immediately pushed some old buttons for me.

When my son was little, I got engaged to a man who’d served in Vietnam. I learned what the possibilities were for my son should there be another war. I knew if war happened, everything would change for him, and his world would never go back to the way it had been.

I knew because I had seen what happened to this man I planned to marry. He suffered with post-traumatic stress and those deep and terrible invisible wounds, so raw and extreme that ultimately, I chose to end our relationship and he was gone, leaving a gaping hole in my son’s and my world. Years later he ended his own life –and took the lives of two others – in a brutal and horrific way. In truth I’d witnessed what war could do to a person, as profoundly and personally as anyone not actually military could.

All that came back when my son chose to join the Army and went off to Basic Training for free college, shooting guns, and lots of structure in July 2001.

And then 9/11 happened, while he was still in training at Ft. Benning, GA.

Like everyone else in America, my world and my perspective changed forever. We weren’t safe here, or anywhere, and what did it mean for us all? And oh wow. What did it mean for my son serving in the military?

There was also this–something that colored my experience of all that was happening with my son. When I was the same age as my 18-year-old son, I lived in a house with my closest friend and several other people, and they were all brutally murdered. I don’t know why I had the good fortune to not be in the house when it happened. That event, and many others during that time in my life, left a multitude of scars and vivid traumatic memories. For me at that age, the world was a dark and dangerous place to live.

Ten years after that, I was a new mom strongly committed to changing my life for the better. I vividly remember looking into my newborn son’s eyes and vowing fiercely that I would protect him forever. I promised him that he would never have to witness or experience the kinds of evil and darkness that I’d lived through.

The irony of this pronouncement came back to haunt me at this point, realizing I had no control over what life would hand my son along the way.  I was witnessing a grotesque mirror of my own 18-year-old life played out in another dimension of horror in his 18-year-old life.

And one week to the day after 9/11, I took the subway to downtown Washington DC, to meet with a therapist. Of course, we talked about the events of the terror attack and how it was impacting me and my family. There in her office, I allowed myself to become fully aware of the reality of my son going to war. And along with that came the staggering realization that he could die in war. I mean, I felt that new reality deep inside me. Everything in my world had completely changed.

And I felt the very real possibility of losing my son forever in a violent and foreign land so far away from me. I felt it deep down in the core of my being, I knew this reality had now attached itself to me and I knew it would stay with me going forward.  I knew this would be my new normal in life.

Then our session was over, and it was the evening rush hour in DC. I still had to take the subway back home to suburban Maryland. As I left her office and walked to the subway, I began to just cry. 

And I could not stop.

And when I say I could not stop, I mean I could not stop, and the tears just kept rolling down my face and I was crying a solid stream of tears, and my chest and throat were so tight I couldn’t breathe, I was sweating, hot and cold both, and I had to get on the subway and go home to take care of my other son waiting for me, and I could not. stop. crying.

At rush hour, the DC subway is so crowded that people are literally crammed into each car, all the seats are filled, and people stand everywhere, in the aisles, by the doors, every space is occupied by bodies. And so, we were all up against each other in some way. This was seven days after our country had been attacked and planes had flown into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and Pennsylvania fields. Remember, this was when there was a constant conversation throughout the country about how we all were united and coming together against a common enemy. It was the only thing on the minds of US citizens at this time. And I was in one of the actual areas attacked. I guarantee everyone was thinking about some variation of it that night.

I remember I was wearing a sweatshirt that had “ARMY” written on it. I remember that I had to stand sandwiched in between two other people and near the exit doors, holding on to a pole so I wouldn’t fall as the train moved. And still crying. It was ugly crying. And was so exactly me that day. I mean, bloodshot and swollen eyes, snot just running down my face along with the tears and I was carrying something, I forget what, but I had nothing to wipe my nose or eyes and I couldn’t even raise my arm to use my sleeve and wipe my face with it. I would turn my head and use my shoulder, but that soon was soaked and useless. I was absolutely mortified to be that vulnerable, and in a cramped small place with so many people and no room to move at all.

I remember feeling kind of out of my mind, because I had simultaneous thoughts of ‘Oh my god, please don’t anyone look at me like this’, and ‘What the hell? No one is saying a word to me or looking in my direction or trying to help.‘ The cruel irony. This is in Washington DC! After a plane had just flown into the Pentagon a week ago! I’m crying inconsolably, wearing a sweatshirt that says Army on it, and NO ONE is moved to reach out in sympathy or compassion?? Agh. I was so full of indignation and at the same time so very mortified. Go figure.

It was a long subway ride back home, and during that time I did not stop crying for even a few seconds. I experienced this weeping in a way where I felt something vital had been ripped out of me and I was bleeding out from the deepest part of me.

Dramatic? Yeah maybe, but melodramatic, or overly dramatic? No, not really. I was realizing on a visceral level that my son was going to go away to a place where men wanted to not just kill him, but torture him, behead him, desecrate his body, and make him suffer a most horrific death. So no, there was nothing over the top about my reaction to that very real possibility. And he was 18. He was only 18 and had not lived anywhere close to long enough yet.

It was a strange phenomenon this weeping. I wasn’t crying loudly, although I did have some involuntary sounds–keening is the word that comes to mind. I now have a true understanding of cultures where mothers are completely overcome with grief, falling down, wailing and lamenting. I get it. It isn’t an act, but instead is a primal, physiological and total emotional experience. I would have told you before this that they were probably, faking or exaggerating. Nope. Not so.

And well, I didn’t stop this until over 4 hours later. Seriously. This did not let up in intensity or constancy for that whole time. I had to ask someone to watch my younger son. I couldn’t go home in this state, it would have frightened and confused him. I wept for hours, and then I oddly started yawning in the middle of crying. Years later, I read something that described this kind of yawning as my body’s way of trying to cool down my brain that was literally overheating from it all.  Interesting fact.

It was a long year.

By the end of that first deployment, I was pretty numbed out. I still wept every day to and from work and experienced unrelenting grief and anxiety, but I felt hollowed out inside, and brittle, like I might snap any minute. My son was injured in an IED attack on their vehicle at one point in the deployment. I got a surprise satellite phone call from his squad leader. Not injured severely enough to be sent home, but bad enough for a few days at the CSH (Combat Support Hospital) then back to his unit. More than any other feeling, I’d describe me as walking around numbly horrified.

When the Christmas bombing on a US base in Mosul happened, the comms blackout for next of kin notification meant I didn’t hear anything from there that whole week leading up to Christmas. I stumbled through the festivities happening all around me and could not speak to anyone about my thoughts or fears, no words could fit for what I felt and thought, there weren’t any.

So when he returned home from the deployment in the fall of 2005, I guess that whole year, combined with the extreme level of excitement and giddiness at his homecoming–there just were no tears left in me that day. Or the next day. Or for a very long time.

In 2008 my son got married. In hindsight I know it was that day when it all caught up with me.

The wedding was across the country from where I lived, and they’d planned a beautiful and elaborate event. Not too lavish, but with great attention to detail and getting it just right. I was a little wary, not trusting where my emotions might go that day, as this was another extreme. It didn’t feel at all like a loss or a negative, but it felt big and important. It went just how they planned, it all fell into place, and they were a beautiful couple. The world was theirs and their future lay bright and shining ahead of them.

At the reception everyone important to them was there. Family members travelled from all over to witness their marriage. As the music started up, the bride had her first dance with her father, and then my son came to ask me to dance. He hadn’t told me what the song would be.

I stood up and heard it start, “Song for Mama” (of course). He picked a song that was over-the-top sentimental and hokey and beautiful and the perfect “dance with your mother at your wedding” song.

And dancing with my son, that’s when it finally all hit me. My son was home, and alive, and he chose a song that was all about how his mother had cared for him and loved and watched over him and how grateful he was. I realized my son was here with me. He was home and he was doing a normal thing. He was getting married, they’d have babies, and live their lives. He was doing what guys do: they get married and dance with their mother at their wedding.

Abruptly, I was able to feel he was really home. And safe. He had come home safely. He was alive.

Of course, I began to cry those same kinds of tears I had after 9/11, that weeping that came from a deep and primal place in me, and I was mortified (again), because I wasn’t just the mother of the groom crying at her son’s wedding. This was way more than that. No one there knew I was crying because my son was ALIVE, and right at that moment I had him with me and he was safe.

And there was such pain and grief from that longest year of my life mixed in with my joy, there was nothing I could do but cry. I hid my face in my son’s shoulder, trying to avoid the wedding photographer because it was that snotty, swollen red-eyed crying stuff, not actually great for pretty wedding pictures. People were watching me cry and again, interesting, no one said a word to me about it that night… or ever.

I’m not sure how clear I was about why it happened this way for me until later. I think my son sensed it, in some way. He was so gentle with me as we danced and I wept, and I hid behind his shoulder.

Now, it makes sense to me that it hit me then, instead of on the day he got back from Iraq. I couldn’t trust or allow myself at that point to feel it when he returned, at his homecoming. It was all still too close. I just couldn’t take in that he was home, and safe. It just took time.

I guess I’ve chosen to look at it kind of like bookends for that time in my life. I had these primal, visceral, powerful, emotional experiences that came on either side of my son’s first deployment. And this was my story between the bookends.

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This first appeared in The Havok Journal on May 21, 2025.

Shelly Harlow is the mother of two US Army veterans. She has worked for the last 20 years in the mental health field with those who have seen and endured more than most humans should ever have to and believes firmly that we are our own most powerful healers. Her own background and history are the foundation for her work with others and for her writing. Her hard-headedness has taken her further than any degree ever has. She remains a cynical optimist whose interest in humans has never faltered, knowing how flawed and amazing we all are.

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.