thedrifter
05-13-07, 07:10 AM
Posted on Sun, May. 13, 2007
Pain of a patriot's mother
By Amy Wilson
AWILSON1@HERALD-LEADER.COM
Marine Lance Cpl. Sean Michael Langley died Sunday Nov. 7, 2004, after being injured the day before in the Al Anbar province, near Ramadi, in Iraq.
Born in Montana, Langley moved to Lexington with his family when he was a child. He attended Blue Grass Baptist School and Lexington Catholic and Henry Clay high schools.
His mother, Patricia Langley, is a Lexington police officer. Until now, she has never spoken publicly about his death or about her own struggle to accept that her elder son lies now in Lexington Cemetery.
This is a story of her grief -- and the depth of a mother's love.
In his last phone call home, he gives her a list of things he needs. Microwaveable mac and cheese, canned shrimp, jerky and, hey, Mom, can you go get some mango-passion fruit soap at Bath and Body Works?
A fellow Marine had used some, and it smelled great.
The box sits ready to go in Tricia Langley's living room. It is early November 2004.
The first official telephone call from the Department of Defense goes to her ex-husband, Bill, and his wife, Susan. Sean has been gravely injured, they're told. They hurry to Tricia's. Terrified, almost hysterical, she says she is going to get on a plane, go over there and help nurse him to health.
He needs me, she thinks.
She packs and waits for word that her plane ticket is ready.
The next day, two casualty officers walk up to her front door. Several other people are there, and no one expects this is anything but a courtesy call.
Sean has died, Marine Lt. Col. Tony Weckerling begins. First Sergeant Jay Foote, making his first casualty call, takes the first blow. Tricia rails, screams and physically hammers the two men.
They absorb the blows and wait.
Anger becomes disbelief, then hope without reason. Tricia feels that Sean is still alive; as a mother, she would know if he no longer drew breath. She had recently been through an almost equally harrowing ordeal, the near-death of another family member. God would not, she reasons, do this to her. He just wouldn't.
Besides, Sean had always promised her he'd be OK.
Desperately searching for answers, angry, scared and grief-stricken, she decides she needs to have a talk with President Bush. She goes to the White House Web site and searches until she finds, miraculously, an Associated Press picture of a Marine handing out candy to liberated Iraqi children.
The caption reads: Lance Cpl. Seann M. Langley.
The name is misspelled, but that isn't the only thing Tricia notices. The Marine in the picture is not her son.
Her hope finds an anchor.
There you go, she says to herself, some other young man -- the one in the picture -- is dead, and they've made a terrible mistake. She is secretly thrilled. She feels guilty, too, because she knows it is some other mother's son and she sends up a prayer for God to help that other woman through this awful time.
No one -- not Bill, not her sister, not her parents, not friends, not chaplains -- can convince her that Sean, her Sean, is dead. She is certain that this all will be straightened out soon enough.
Still, as she waits for another woman's son to arrive in Lexington, she finds she cannot eat.
Sean decided to enlist late on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. She shared his passion for retribution. Hers was a military family. She had been an active duty officer in the United States Air Force when Sean was born. Now a Lexington police officer, she'd spent 10 years in the reserves. His father, Bill, spent 20 years in the Air Force. His grandfather was a 20-year career man, too.
Sean was 17 years old on 9/11. Tricia signed the papers that allowed him to enter the Marines before his 18th birthday. (Years later, this decision would pile guilt upon grief.)
Sean's parents had been divorced since he was 10. He lived with his mother, who took night shifts so that she could be the everyday at-home mama. He struggled in school, but she always believed in him. He tested her patience from early on, climbing out of windows while in time-out, jumping out of trees in their front yard.
Sean liked being a Marine. It suited him.
During his first tour in Iraq, there was a lot he didn't share with his mother. He knew she would worry.
They shared a running joke. He would tell her a story about some wayward boy behavior in Iraq, some slight risk he'd taken, something he knew she wouldn't approve of and she'd respond, "Don't make me come over there."
They'd laugh because Sean secretly must have feared she might.
She found she could watch the war on TV any time of the day or night. She would hear of Marine casualties and wait for 24 hours -- the time she gave the Corps to notify her. Then she would breathe again.
In 2003, he came back after his first tour as all young soldiers do: changed. He was going to do a second tour of duty, he announced. He just couldn't let his guys down. Almost 20, now a senior guy in the unit, the younger ones needed his expertise.
Sean came home on emergency leave in August 2004 when a family member was near death. His leave was not even 48 hours.
At Blue Grass Airport to send him back to a life she can barely imagine, Tricia kisses him, touches his face. Not the overly affectionate type, he hugs her then for a long time. She asks if he is frightened. He says yes.
On Nov. 7, Sean Langley's unit's job is to remove hostile action on roadways before engineers can be brought in to help with rebuilding. While he mans the .50-caliber gun, the convoy his Hummer is in comes to a fork in the road. No one is sure which way they are supposed to turn.
Sean volunteers to stick his head out of the turret for a good look. As he does, a large piece of shrapnel from a nearby explosion enters the back of his head and neck, just below the protective covering of his helmet and above the shield of his flak jacket. His war is over.
He is evacuated to Germany before he is declared brain dead and taken off respirators.
His body is delayed in returning home because of heavy fighting near Fallujah.
Sean's body does not arrive in Lexington until the night of Nov. 14.
An honor guard meets his plane. He is put in a hearse and driven to Kerr Brothers Funeral Home on Harrodsburg Road.
Funeral officials ask his parents to give them a few minutes to make him presentable for visitation.
Tricia, still convinced that the body will be somebody else's son, is told she can see him.
She looks at this patriot lying in front of her. She is concerned because it sort of looks like Sean. She thinks of something she has not thought of for years. There is a strawberry birthmark at the top of Sean's neck. She tells herself that when she looks there, it won't be there and then the military machine will roll on and she can get back to her life.
She asks the funeral home director, Billy Shell, and Marine escort, First Sgt. Jay Foote, to unwrap his carefully bandaged head so she can check for the birthmark. They hesitate, concerned that the lance corporal's body, swollen and deteriorating, might not withstand so much handling. First Sgt. Foote and others weigh the ethics of how far to go.
She presses them.
They do as she asks, carefully holding the young man's head, turning it just so.
She sees the birthmark. She looks again at his face.
She needs to sit. She needs not to move from this spot ever again.
Because Sean grew up around the Lexington police department, many officers are with the family at the funeral home. Officer Ray Alexander, a former Marine who had talked to Sean before he entered the Corps, is there for two days. He helps the funeral home directors dress and undress Sean because his mother has requested, for example, to see his toes.
Nothing about his body, as poor a shape as it is in, disturbs her. This was a child she had given birth to, one who had vomited on her more than once. What about him could be offensive?
Left alone with him, she tries to open his eyes. They are glued shut. He had such beautiful blue eyes, she thinks. Death would not have diminished them.
It becomes late. She is told the facility is closing. She tells the funeral home personnel goodbye but explains that she is going nowhere.
She refuses to leave Sean. Those around her believe that she is faint, dehydrated, delirious and probably in need of sedation.
Around 2 a.m., someone calls Marine First Sgt. Foote out of bed to see if he can do something. He arrives at the funeral home in his dress blue uniform. A lot of people are in the hall. They tell him he is their last hope to get Tricia to go home.
Foote enters the sanctuary where Sean and Tricia quietly coexist. He salutes the lance corporal and then addresses Tricia. They talk for an hour.
He tells her that Marines are very goal-oriented, that Sean had signed up to do his duty and serve his country and he wasn't done yet. Foote needs some time with Sean, he says, so that this good Marine can finish the job. He would have a hard few days to get through before he could be laid to rest, said Foote, and he, for one, would not allow Sean to be anything less than perfect. He tells her that not only will he clean the funeral home from top to bottom, but he will make sure Sean's uniform is pressed and his buttons are polished.
He will make him parade-ready.
Will you let me help Sean finish his mission?
Tricia says she will. She kisses her son and goes home, promising him that he needn't worry, she'll be right back.
Sgt. Foote stands guard until 4 a.m., when Officer Alexander takes over.
At 6 a.m., Tricia is back at the funeral home door.
Alexander, without argument, lets her in.
Alone again with her son's body, she talks to Sean. She argues with him. She strokes his hair. She apologizes for everything.
She randomly opens the Bible and falls upon Luke 7:11, the story of a mother grieving her dead son. Jesus tells the woman not to weep. He touches the coffin. The young man arises and Jesus gives him back to his mother.
Tricia sits patiently. Her faith is such and her grief is such that she is ready to see Sean arise from the dead.
She waits. She tells someone that she saw his eyes flutter. She thinks she sees his hands move and, look, his chest is rising.
On the end of the second day, when they tell her again that she must go home to rest, she says, OK, I'll just take him with me.
No one knows where this is going to end.
Late that night, toward the end of the second day of knowing Sean has died, she walks to the center of the old, one-lane Clays Ferry Bridge.
She looks over the side of the bridge, considers the jump. She calls First Sgt. Foote, tells him that she is the happiest she's been since she heard the news. She says she's fine.
She looks over the edge again. Then she hears a familiar voice in her head. Sean's voice.
He simply says, No, Mom.
Later, on Thanksgiving night, she finally gets through to the neurosurgeon who attended Sean at his death. He walks her through what they did for Sean. He tells her that Sean was simply too hurt to be saved.
The doctor tells her how they covered him with a warmed blanket and turned off the lights and his respirator. The Marine chaplain, his doctors and his nurses then said a prayer for him and solemnly stood by until he breathed no more.
The neurosurgeon assures her that somebody was always at his bedside and there was always someone holding his hand.
Her rage at not being allowed to be with him at his death is calmed, if only a little. They could have waited for her, couldn't they?
The doctor explains how this was best for Sean.
In the months following Sean's death, Tricia tries to enlist in the Marines. The Lexington recruiter hears of her past Air Force experience, her 14 years of police work and is elated even though she is now 46 years old.
Then it comes out that she is the mother of a dead Marine. He suggests she call his superior in Louisville. She does, and that conversation goes well until she gets to the mother part. He backtracks. He hems. He haws. He explains what a really bad idea enlisting might be for someone like her. He starts to talk to her about police work. A Marine for 22 years, the big-deal recruiter says he always wanted to be a police officer. She says it is rewarding work. (The recruiter is now a Lexington police officer.)
Lt. Col. Weckerling and First Sgt. Foote show up that night at her home.
She tells them she talked to a recruiter. They say they know.
Sean's making me go over there, she says.
But no one will let her.
In March 2007 -- more than two years after her son's death -- she flies on the spur of the moment to California to see Sean's unit deploy again to Iraq. They tell her wonderful stories about Sean and relive moments she wants recounted over and over. At the end of the day, dutifully lined up to leave, they break ranks to hug her before they get on the buses that will take them to March Air Force Base.
She feels like she is the stand-in mom for every mother not there.
These days, she gets up even if she doesn't want to. She showers even if she doesn't want to. She is back at work, assigned to the Lexington Police Bureau of Community Service.
Blue Star mothers, an organization for mothers with children in the military, invite her to events. But she doesn't go. She still isn't ready for that.
She does not go often to Sean's grave. Such visits slow her ability to overcome her depression. Medications are helping. So, too, is her faith.
She is in email contact with a few young men from Sean's unit. They seem to like that. She does, too.
Still, no one thinks she is the same as she was before 2004.
She agrees. But she is still Sean's mother, and nothing that happens on heaven or earth will ever change that.
About this story
For this narrative, Herald-Leader staff writer Amy Wilson conducted extensive interviews and correspondence with Patricia Langley over a four-month period. She also spoke or corresponded with her ex-husband, William Langley, and son, Christopher Matthew Langley. Also interviewed for this story: Lexington police officer Ray Alexander, Billy Shell of Kerr Brothers Funeral Home, Marine First Sgt. Jay Foote, Marine Sgt. Matthew Shelato in Camp Pendleton, Calif., and friends of Patricia Langley.
Reach Amy Wilson at (859) 231-3305 or 1-800-950-6397, Ext. 3305
Ellie
Pain of a patriot's mother
By Amy Wilson
AWILSON1@HERALD-LEADER.COM
Marine Lance Cpl. Sean Michael Langley died Sunday Nov. 7, 2004, after being injured the day before in the Al Anbar province, near Ramadi, in Iraq.
Born in Montana, Langley moved to Lexington with his family when he was a child. He attended Blue Grass Baptist School and Lexington Catholic and Henry Clay high schools.
His mother, Patricia Langley, is a Lexington police officer. Until now, she has never spoken publicly about his death or about her own struggle to accept that her elder son lies now in Lexington Cemetery.
This is a story of her grief -- and the depth of a mother's love.
In his last phone call home, he gives her a list of things he needs. Microwaveable mac and cheese, canned shrimp, jerky and, hey, Mom, can you go get some mango-passion fruit soap at Bath and Body Works?
A fellow Marine had used some, and it smelled great.
The box sits ready to go in Tricia Langley's living room. It is early November 2004.
The first official telephone call from the Department of Defense goes to her ex-husband, Bill, and his wife, Susan. Sean has been gravely injured, they're told. They hurry to Tricia's. Terrified, almost hysterical, she says she is going to get on a plane, go over there and help nurse him to health.
He needs me, she thinks.
She packs and waits for word that her plane ticket is ready.
The next day, two casualty officers walk up to her front door. Several other people are there, and no one expects this is anything but a courtesy call.
Sean has died, Marine Lt. Col. Tony Weckerling begins. First Sergeant Jay Foote, making his first casualty call, takes the first blow. Tricia rails, screams and physically hammers the two men.
They absorb the blows and wait.
Anger becomes disbelief, then hope without reason. Tricia feels that Sean is still alive; as a mother, she would know if he no longer drew breath. She had recently been through an almost equally harrowing ordeal, the near-death of another family member. God would not, she reasons, do this to her. He just wouldn't.
Besides, Sean had always promised her he'd be OK.
Desperately searching for answers, angry, scared and grief-stricken, she decides she needs to have a talk with President Bush. She goes to the White House Web site and searches until she finds, miraculously, an Associated Press picture of a Marine handing out candy to liberated Iraqi children.
The caption reads: Lance Cpl. Seann M. Langley.
The name is misspelled, but that isn't the only thing Tricia notices. The Marine in the picture is not her son.
Her hope finds an anchor.
There you go, she says to herself, some other young man -- the one in the picture -- is dead, and they've made a terrible mistake. She is secretly thrilled. She feels guilty, too, because she knows it is some other mother's son and she sends up a prayer for God to help that other woman through this awful time.
No one -- not Bill, not her sister, not her parents, not friends, not chaplains -- can convince her that Sean, her Sean, is dead. She is certain that this all will be straightened out soon enough.
Still, as she waits for another woman's son to arrive in Lexington, she finds she cannot eat.
Sean decided to enlist late on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. She shared his passion for retribution. Hers was a military family. She had been an active duty officer in the United States Air Force when Sean was born. Now a Lexington police officer, she'd spent 10 years in the reserves. His father, Bill, spent 20 years in the Air Force. His grandfather was a 20-year career man, too.
Sean was 17 years old on 9/11. Tricia signed the papers that allowed him to enter the Marines before his 18th birthday. (Years later, this decision would pile guilt upon grief.)
Sean's parents had been divorced since he was 10. He lived with his mother, who took night shifts so that she could be the everyday at-home mama. He struggled in school, but she always believed in him. He tested her patience from early on, climbing out of windows while in time-out, jumping out of trees in their front yard.
Sean liked being a Marine. It suited him.
During his first tour in Iraq, there was a lot he didn't share with his mother. He knew she would worry.
They shared a running joke. He would tell her a story about some wayward boy behavior in Iraq, some slight risk he'd taken, something he knew she wouldn't approve of and she'd respond, "Don't make me come over there."
They'd laugh because Sean secretly must have feared she might.
She found she could watch the war on TV any time of the day or night. She would hear of Marine casualties and wait for 24 hours -- the time she gave the Corps to notify her. Then she would breathe again.
In 2003, he came back after his first tour as all young soldiers do: changed. He was going to do a second tour of duty, he announced. He just couldn't let his guys down. Almost 20, now a senior guy in the unit, the younger ones needed his expertise.
Sean came home on emergency leave in August 2004 when a family member was near death. His leave was not even 48 hours.
At Blue Grass Airport to send him back to a life she can barely imagine, Tricia kisses him, touches his face. Not the overly affectionate type, he hugs her then for a long time. She asks if he is frightened. He says yes.
On Nov. 7, Sean Langley's unit's job is to remove hostile action on roadways before engineers can be brought in to help with rebuilding. While he mans the .50-caliber gun, the convoy his Hummer is in comes to a fork in the road. No one is sure which way they are supposed to turn.
Sean volunteers to stick his head out of the turret for a good look. As he does, a large piece of shrapnel from a nearby explosion enters the back of his head and neck, just below the protective covering of his helmet and above the shield of his flak jacket. His war is over.
He is evacuated to Germany before he is declared brain dead and taken off respirators.
His body is delayed in returning home because of heavy fighting near Fallujah.
Sean's body does not arrive in Lexington until the night of Nov. 14.
An honor guard meets his plane. He is put in a hearse and driven to Kerr Brothers Funeral Home on Harrodsburg Road.
Funeral officials ask his parents to give them a few minutes to make him presentable for visitation.
Tricia, still convinced that the body will be somebody else's son, is told she can see him.
She looks at this patriot lying in front of her. She is concerned because it sort of looks like Sean. She thinks of something she has not thought of for years. There is a strawberry birthmark at the top of Sean's neck. She tells herself that when she looks there, it won't be there and then the military machine will roll on and she can get back to her life.
She asks the funeral home director, Billy Shell, and Marine escort, First Sgt. Jay Foote, to unwrap his carefully bandaged head so she can check for the birthmark. They hesitate, concerned that the lance corporal's body, swollen and deteriorating, might not withstand so much handling. First Sgt. Foote and others weigh the ethics of how far to go.
She presses them.
They do as she asks, carefully holding the young man's head, turning it just so.
She sees the birthmark. She looks again at his face.
She needs to sit. She needs not to move from this spot ever again.
Because Sean grew up around the Lexington police department, many officers are with the family at the funeral home. Officer Ray Alexander, a former Marine who had talked to Sean before he entered the Corps, is there for two days. He helps the funeral home directors dress and undress Sean because his mother has requested, for example, to see his toes.
Nothing about his body, as poor a shape as it is in, disturbs her. This was a child she had given birth to, one who had vomited on her more than once. What about him could be offensive?
Left alone with him, she tries to open his eyes. They are glued shut. He had such beautiful blue eyes, she thinks. Death would not have diminished them.
It becomes late. She is told the facility is closing. She tells the funeral home personnel goodbye but explains that she is going nowhere.
She refuses to leave Sean. Those around her believe that she is faint, dehydrated, delirious and probably in need of sedation.
Around 2 a.m., someone calls Marine First Sgt. Foote out of bed to see if he can do something. He arrives at the funeral home in his dress blue uniform. A lot of people are in the hall. They tell him he is their last hope to get Tricia to go home.
Foote enters the sanctuary where Sean and Tricia quietly coexist. He salutes the lance corporal and then addresses Tricia. They talk for an hour.
He tells her that Marines are very goal-oriented, that Sean had signed up to do his duty and serve his country and he wasn't done yet. Foote needs some time with Sean, he says, so that this good Marine can finish the job. He would have a hard few days to get through before he could be laid to rest, said Foote, and he, for one, would not allow Sean to be anything less than perfect. He tells her that not only will he clean the funeral home from top to bottom, but he will make sure Sean's uniform is pressed and his buttons are polished.
He will make him parade-ready.
Will you let me help Sean finish his mission?
Tricia says she will. She kisses her son and goes home, promising him that he needn't worry, she'll be right back.
Sgt. Foote stands guard until 4 a.m., when Officer Alexander takes over.
At 6 a.m., Tricia is back at the funeral home door.
Alexander, without argument, lets her in.
Alone again with her son's body, she talks to Sean. She argues with him. She strokes his hair. She apologizes for everything.
She randomly opens the Bible and falls upon Luke 7:11, the story of a mother grieving her dead son. Jesus tells the woman not to weep. He touches the coffin. The young man arises and Jesus gives him back to his mother.
Tricia sits patiently. Her faith is such and her grief is such that she is ready to see Sean arise from the dead.
She waits. She tells someone that she saw his eyes flutter. She thinks she sees his hands move and, look, his chest is rising.
On the end of the second day, when they tell her again that she must go home to rest, she says, OK, I'll just take him with me.
No one knows where this is going to end.
Late that night, toward the end of the second day of knowing Sean has died, she walks to the center of the old, one-lane Clays Ferry Bridge.
She looks over the side of the bridge, considers the jump. She calls First Sgt. Foote, tells him that she is the happiest she's been since she heard the news. She says she's fine.
She looks over the edge again. Then she hears a familiar voice in her head. Sean's voice.
He simply says, No, Mom.
Later, on Thanksgiving night, she finally gets through to the neurosurgeon who attended Sean at his death. He walks her through what they did for Sean. He tells her that Sean was simply too hurt to be saved.
The doctor tells her how they covered him with a warmed blanket and turned off the lights and his respirator. The Marine chaplain, his doctors and his nurses then said a prayer for him and solemnly stood by until he breathed no more.
The neurosurgeon assures her that somebody was always at his bedside and there was always someone holding his hand.
Her rage at not being allowed to be with him at his death is calmed, if only a little. They could have waited for her, couldn't they?
The doctor explains how this was best for Sean.
In the months following Sean's death, Tricia tries to enlist in the Marines. The Lexington recruiter hears of her past Air Force experience, her 14 years of police work and is elated even though she is now 46 years old.
Then it comes out that she is the mother of a dead Marine. He suggests she call his superior in Louisville. She does, and that conversation goes well until she gets to the mother part. He backtracks. He hems. He haws. He explains what a really bad idea enlisting might be for someone like her. He starts to talk to her about police work. A Marine for 22 years, the big-deal recruiter says he always wanted to be a police officer. She says it is rewarding work. (The recruiter is now a Lexington police officer.)
Lt. Col. Weckerling and First Sgt. Foote show up that night at her home.
She tells them she talked to a recruiter. They say they know.
Sean's making me go over there, she says.
But no one will let her.
In March 2007 -- more than two years after her son's death -- she flies on the spur of the moment to California to see Sean's unit deploy again to Iraq. They tell her wonderful stories about Sean and relive moments she wants recounted over and over. At the end of the day, dutifully lined up to leave, they break ranks to hug her before they get on the buses that will take them to March Air Force Base.
She feels like she is the stand-in mom for every mother not there.
These days, she gets up even if she doesn't want to. She showers even if she doesn't want to. She is back at work, assigned to the Lexington Police Bureau of Community Service.
Blue Star mothers, an organization for mothers with children in the military, invite her to events. But she doesn't go. She still isn't ready for that.
She does not go often to Sean's grave. Such visits slow her ability to overcome her depression. Medications are helping. So, too, is her faith.
She is in email contact with a few young men from Sean's unit. They seem to like that. She does, too.
Still, no one thinks she is the same as she was before 2004.
She agrees. But she is still Sean's mother, and nothing that happens on heaven or earth will ever change that.
About this story
For this narrative, Herald-Leader staff writer Amy Wilson conducted extensive interviews and correspondence with Patricia Langley over a four-month period. She also spoke or corresponded with her ex-husband, William Langley, and son, Christopher Matthew Langley. Also interviewed for this story: Lexington police officer Ray Alexander, Billy Shell of Kerr Brothers Funeral Home, Marine First Sgt. Jay Foote, Marine Sgt. Matthew Shelato in Camp Pendleton, Calif., and friends of Patricia Langley.
Reach Amy Wilson at (859) 231-3305 or 1-800-950-6397, Ext. 3305
Ellie