War widows cope with documentary

NY Times:

When your husband dies at war, the things he carried show up in six black boxes.

Each pair of socks, each T-shirt, each love letter is inventoried on 20 sheets of paper. Everything has been washed, so when you breathe in the scent of a shirt, it doesn’t smell like him.

When a soldier dies, grief is followed by immersion in the somber routines and protocols of a military death.

These, at least, were the experiences that Taryn Davis — who became a 21-year-old widow on May 21, 2007, when her husband, Cpl. Michael W. Davis of the Army, was killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq — decided to preserve in a documentary titled “American Widow Project,” which she began filming several months after Michael’s death. (The 75-minute documentary will be available online from americanwidowproject.org next month; a preview of it can be seen on YouTube.)

Recalling the days after her husband died, Ms. Davis said: “I was basically on the Internet for 14 hours a day looking for resources. I wanted facts, and I wanted reality. I started looking and couldn’t find anything, and I realized that what I needed was another widow to come to my house.”

Instead she went to others’ houses.

From September until April, Ms. Davis, who lives in San Marcos, Tex., hopscotched the country with a camera, filming interviews with other young war widows; the oldest was 37. She began in Atlanta.

“The first was a widow who was in my husband’s unit,” Ms. Davis said last week by telephone. “We were both emotional wrecks.” She later visited a widow in Ohio on Valentine’s Day, and went with her to the soldier’s grave with flowers and tinsel.

Ms. Davis isn’t a filmmaker by profession; she recently earned her real estate license.

“It was for me,” she said, of the documentary. “I was hoping I would learn a little about what my life would be like without Michael. I really just wanted to know that I wasn’t alone.”

Ms. Davis’s endeavor caught the eye of Amanda Spain, a Los Angeles documentary producer. Her weekly series “In Their Boots,” shown online (at intheirboots.com), chronicles the stories of military families. When Ms. Davis screened her film at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Austin, Tex., last month, about 30 widows came from around the country to see it. Afterwards they shared stories over margaritas. The weekend itself was documented by Ms. Spain for her series.

“What was really cool was seeing all these women coming together to talk about their husbands,” Ms. Spain said. “You saw this life come into them.”

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Her aim is to distribute the documentary to new war widows and widowers within the first two weeks of receiving the news of their spouse’s death, not just to share stories but also to give practical information: like when to expect the body to be flown home, what to do with personal items and how to plan a funeral.

There are seemingly hundreds of choices widows have to make. There is even an emotional timeline on the Web site that stretches from the day of death to two years, describing the stages of grief. (At Year 2, it says: “Contrary to what most un-widowed people think, the second year can often be more difficult than the first. There are no more first holidays and first anniversaries to conquer. This is often a time when you begin to deal with the reality of life without your spouse.”)

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War widows adopt their own vernacular, and time is something measured in small increments. “I just hit the one-year mark in May,” Ms. Davis said, “and I never thought that I’d be able to laugh again as hard as I have with these widows.”

I wish them well. Their loss is hard to imagine, but the will to survive and deal with the challenges life throws your way appears to be strong in these women.