thedrifter
01-01-07, 08:03 AM
Cold Ground for a Summer Love
Arlington Shelters the Memories of a Young Virginia Marine's Romance
By Sandhya Somashekhar
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 1, 2007; A01
It is but one white crest in a sea of thousands, but Kira knows Colin's grave like home.
She comes to it in the morning, before the air fills with the sounds of idling tour buses and rifle salutes. She comes bearing gifts, an armful of fresh flowers or some plastic ones when it's cold.
For more than three months, she has come to Arlington National Cemetery to talk to Colin about the minutiae of her life, to kiss his narrow white headstone topped with a Star of David and to stretch out her slim body next to his as if they were lying together again.
Kira is no war widow. She is 19, and just barely, at that. The young couple's only talk of marriage had been a joke about their similar last names, hers Wolf and his Wolfe. But they fell in love at once, the kind of reckless, consuming love available only to the young.
"The kind of love where your whole world is on fire and you can't stop smiling," she said. "The kind of love where you dance around and you don't feel like you're part of this world anymore."
They dated for one perfect month before he shipped out to Iraq with his fellow Marines from Camp Lejeune, N.C., in July.
The day he left, she gave him a gift -- a camera, and instructions to photograph everything he saw. As he rounded the barracks without so much as a glance behind, she told herself he would be back in seven short months. She could wait.
But he came back much sooner, just seven weeks after his departure, his burned remains laid in a flag-draped coffin. He was buried at Arlington on Sept. 11, five years to the day that inspired his journey, one of at least 3,000 members of the U.S. military killed in a war that began when he was 16 years old.
On Sept. 12, her 19th birthday, she returned to his grave. She has come every weekend since, and every other day when she's home from college.
"When we were apart, all we did was talk about how we could hold each other again when he came back," Kira said, plucking at the grass around his grave. "Now that he's back, we're only a few feet apart and I still can't hold him."
Young Love
Kira was 18 when she locked eyes with 19-year-old Colin Joseph Wolfe in the parking lot of a Wendy's restaurant in Manassas on a humid summer night.
"He's so cute," Kira told her friend.
They saw little of each other at first, with Colin at Camp Lejeune and Kira at her parents' home in Fairfax County. When they did meet on his weekend trips home, they were all heat and sweetness, two young people enjoying their youth and freedom.
When they were apart, they exchanged breathless text messages on their cellphones.
"To me, you are perfect," Kira would write.
"Ur better," he would respond.
They didn't talk much about the future or death, except those stark memories of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that had made things click in his mind. He had always planned to join the service, he had told her, motivated by a deep appreciation for the Americans' liberation of the Jews during World War II. The attacks on U.S. soil sealed his resolve, he told her, and he enlisted right after graduating from Osbourn High School, in the summer of '05.
On the eve of his departure from Camp Lejeune, Kira joined him in North Carolina to say goodbye. They kept the conversation light and normal, hoping to prolong all the perfection. She told him she'd wait for him.
"I told him that seven months wasn't very long at all," she said.
After he left, they moved from those flirtatious text messages to the effusive, romantic language of handwritten letters. "Baby I love you so much and miss you so much," he wrote Aug. 11. "Feel better and know I'll always be a ear for you and you can tell me anything you need to good or bad."
The fall semester began, but Kira's mind lingered on what it would be like when Colin returned. "Will it be cold? Can I wear heels? I want to look as good as possible," she told herself. "Would I throw my arms around him? Or would I be stuck in place with happiness?"
On Aug. 30, as she sat restlessly in class at Radford University, she wrote a poem about the month Colin was to return to her.
"To miss rough hands, stern eyes so much, They knife the heart with thoughts . . . of sweet February."
On the other side of the world, Colin had volunteered for a midday mission in the town of Habbaniya. His Humvee hit a roadside bomb. The blast ignited the gas tank, then the ammunition. He died instantly.
When Colin came home, Kira would wear black.
Two Mothers' Sorrow
Kira called her mother, sobbing and hysterical. Kira's mother and father, recently separated, went to Radford to get her. Her mom, Valerie Makepeace, began to grasp the depth of her daughter's love for the boy who had been so polite and respectful.
They took her to Colin's home in Manassas so she could sleep in his bed that night.
It was a pain her mom understood. When she was 27, Makepeace's first husband died in a motorcycle accident, a jarring experience that left her wondering how she would face the many years to come without him. She sees her daughter's trips to the cemetery as healthy, part of a healing process that has only begun.
But Makepeace worries about her daughter, about her being frozen forever in a perfect month, one in which Kira and Colin never fought, never argued.
"He will always be perfect. They will always be perfect. She will never, ever see a side of Colin that was not perfect," Makepeace said. "And who can compete with perfection?"
It is a question that occurs to Colin's family, too.
Colin's mother, Amy Wolfe, said she sometimes wishes Kira had been pregnant when Colin left, a little piece of her son alive and growing at home. But no, she said, laughing, he was too good of a kid for that.
Now, the family's hope for Kira is that she moves on one day and finds a new love, she said.
"As Colin's mother, I don't find anything negative in her going to the cemetery," she said. "But if I were her mother, I would be saying: 'Honey, let it go, move on. You're a young girl, and you have your whole life ahead of you.' But Kira, I don't think she's ready to let go."
Kira's Vigil
"To me, it's the most comforting place in the world because it's the closest I can be to him," said Kira, her legs curled beneath her a few feet above where Colin's body lies.
On the first pilgrimage to his grave, Sept. 12, she spent three hours there, crying and telling him about how beautiful the service had been.
She received a postcard from him that day, too, sent weeks before on the back of a photo of him in fatigues. It was hastily written, she could tell, a note to say he was thinking about her. It also said, "I'm doing alright just really tired."
Her recent visits have been shorter, about an hour each, long enough to lay fresh flowers and talk like they did when he was alive.
"Normally, I just lie down next to him and tell him about my day, about school," she said, her car keys out of her pocket now, tracing an imaginary line in the grass. "I tell him how his family is doing. And I always tell him he's here with a lot of good men, but he's the best."
She has watched his grave grow over, from a flat rectangle of dirt labeled with a plastic marker to a green meadow flanked by marble. She watched his row of headstones fill out and looked on in sorrow as another row began. There are 29 new graves after Colin's in Section 60, about half so new they lack headstones.
She has met best friends, wives, brothers, parents who come to pay respects to their dead. Some see her and can't help but take her in their arms and hug her. They tell her, simply, "I'm sorry."
She has come to know so many of the dead men and women who will surround Colin for eternity -- the one who survived battle but succumbed to a heart defect, the one who took a Darth Vader mask to Iraq -- that she has started laying flowers at their graves, too. She imagines them all together somewhere, Colin among them, swapping stories and throwing back beers.
The thought makes her smile.
"I think about him all day, every day," she said. "I'm lucky, though, because I don't think a lot of people get to fall in love the way I did. I'm glad I had him, even if it wasn't for very long."
Ellie
Arlington Shelters the Memories of a Young Virginia Marine's Romance
By Sandhya Somashekhar
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 1, 2007; A01
It is but one white crest in a sea of thousands, but Kira knows Colin's grave like home.
She comes to it in the morning, before the air fills with the sounds of idling tour buses and rifle salutes. She comes bearing gifts, an armful of fresh flowers or some plastic ones when it's cold.
For more than three months, she has come to Arlington National Cemetery to talk to Colin about the minutiae of her life, to kiss his narrow white headstone topped with a Star of David and to stretch out her slim body next to his as if they were lying together again.
Kira is no war widow. She is 19, and just barely, at that. The young couple's only talk of marriage had been a joke about their similar last names, hers Wolf and his Wolfe. But they fell in love at once, the kind of reckless, consuming love available only to the young.
"The kind of love where your whole world is on fire and you can't stop smiling," she said. "The kind of love where you dance around and you don't feel like you're part of this world anymore."
They dated for one perfect month before he shipped out to Iraq with his fellow Marines from Camp Lejeune, N.C., in July.
The day he left, she gave him a gift -- a camera, and instructions to photograph everything he saw. As he rounded the barracks without so much as a glance behind, she told herself he would be back in seven short months. She could wait.
But he came back much sooner, just seven weeks after his departure, his burned remains laid in a flag-draped coffin. He was buried at Arlington on Sept. 11, five years to the day that inspired his journey, one of at least 3,000 members of the U.S. military killed in a war that began when he was 16 years old.
On Sept. 12, her 19th birthday, she returned to his grave. She has come every weekend since, and every other day when she's home from college.
"When we were apart, all we did was talk about how we could hold each other again when he came back," Kira said, plucking at the grass around his grave. "Now that he's back, we're only a few feet apart and I still can't hold him."
Young Love
Kira was 18 when she locked eyes with 19-year-old Colin Joseph Wolfe in the parking lot of a Wendy's restaurant in Manassas on a humid summer night.
"He's so cute," Kira told her friend.
They saw little of each other at first, with Colin at Camp Lejeune and Kira at her parents' home in Fairfax County. When they did meet on his weekend trips home, they were all heat and sweetness, two young people enjoying their youth and freedom.
When they were apart, they exchanged breathless text messages on their cellphones.
"To me, you are perfect," Kira would write.
"Ur better," he would respond.
They didn't talk much about the future or death, except those stark memories of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that had made things click in his mind. He had always planned to join the service, he had told her, motivated by a deep appreciation for the Americans' liberation of the Jews during World War II. The attacks on U.S. soil sealed his resolve, he told her, and he enlisted right after graduating from Osbourn High School, in the summer of '05.
On the eve of his departure from Camp Lejeune, Kira joined him in North Carolina to say goodbye. They kept the conversation light and normal, hoping to prolong all the perfection. She told him she'd wait for him.
"I told him that seven months wasn't very long at all," she said.
After he left, they moved from those flirtatious text messages to the effusive, romantic language of handwritten letters. "Baby I love you so much and miss you so much," he wrote Aug. 11. "Feel better and know I'll always be a ear for you and you can tell me anything you need to good or bad."
The fall semester began, but Kira's mind lingered on what it would be like when Colin returned. "Will it be cold? Can I wear heels? I want to look as good as possible," she told herself. "Would I throw my arms around him? Or would I be stuck in place with happiness?"
On Aug. 30, as she sat restlessly in class at Radford University, she wrote a poem about the month Colin was to return to her.
"To miss rough hands, stern eyes so much, They knife the heart with thoughts . . . of sweet February."
On the other side of the world, Colin had volunteered for a midday mission in the town of Habbaniya. His Humvee hit a roadside bomb. The blast ignited the gas tank, then the ammunition. He died instantly.
When Colin came home, Kira would wear black.
Two Mothers' Sorrow
Kira called her mother, sobbing and hysterical. Kira's mother and father, recently separated, went to Radford to get her. Her mom, Valerie Makepeace, began to grasp the depth of her daughter's love for the boy who had been so polite and respectful.
They took her to Colin's home in Manassas so she could sleep in his bed that night.
It was a pain her mom understood. When she was 27, Makepeace's first husband died in a motorcycle accident, a jarring experience that left her wondering how she would face the many years to come without him. She sees her daughter's trips to the cemetery as healthy, part of a healing process that has only begun.
But Makepeace worries about her daughter, about her being frozen forever in a perfect month, one in which Kira and Colin never fought, never argued.
"He will always be perfect. They will always be perfect. She will never, ever see a side of Colin that was not perfect," Makepeace said. "And who can compete with perfection?"
It is a question that occurs to Colin's family, too.
Colin's mother, Amy Wolfe, said she sometimes wishes Kira had been pregnant when Colin left, a little piece of her son alive and growing at home. But no, she said, laughing, he was too good of a kid for that.
Now, the family's hope for Kira is that she moves on one day and finds a new love, she said.
"As Colin's mother, I don't find anything negative in her going to the cemetery," she said. "But if I were her mother, I would be saying: 'Honey, let it go, move on. You're a young girl, and you have your whole life ahead of you.' But Kira, I don't think she's ready to let go."
Kira's Vigil
"To me, it's the most comforting place in the world because it's the closest I can be to him," said Kira, her legs curled beneath her a few feet above where Colin's body lies.
On the first pilgrimage to his grave, Sept. 12, she spent three hours there, crying and telling him about how beautiful the service had been.
She received a postcard from him that day, too, sent weeks before on the back of a photo of him in fatigues. It was hastily written, she could tell, a note to say he was thinking about her. It also said, "I'm doing alright just really tired."
Her recent visits have been shorter, about an hour each, long enough to lay fresh flowers and talk like they did when he was alive.
"Normally, I just lie down next to him and tell him about my day, about school," she said, her car keys out of her pocket now, tracing an imaginary line in the grass. "I tell him how his family is doing. And I always tell him he's here with a lot of good men, but he's the best."
She has watched his grave grow over, from a flat rectangle of dirt labeled with a plastic marker to a green meadow flanked by marble. She watched his row of headstones fill out and looked on in sorrow as another row began. There are 29 new graves after Colin's in Section 60, about half so new they lack headstones.
She has met best friends, wives, brothers, parents who come to pay respects to their dead. Some see her and can't help but take her in their arms and hug her. They tell her, simply, "I'm sorry."
She has come to know so many of the dead men and women who will surround Colin for eternity -- the one who survived battle but succumbed to a heart defect, the one who took a Darth Vader mask to Iraq -- that she has started laying flowers at their graves, too. She imagines them all together somewhere, Colin among them, swapping stories and throwing back beers.
The thought makes her smile.
"I think about him all day, every day," she said. "I'm lucky, though, because I don't think a lot of people get to fall in love the way I did. I'm glad I had him, even if it wasn't for very long."
Ellie