On The Spot: The Public Hellos and Goodbyes

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Saying goodbye to the love of your life in a crowd of other people becomes pretty routine when you are a military significant other or spouse. Goodbyes happen in parking lots, on ship docks and plenty of times at airports and on curbs in front of airports. It's usually not just goodbye for a couple of days, it's goodbye for a couple of months or far longer.

Mr. Hart had been coming and going most of the time in the two years before our deployment started. I had lived on my own as a adult for long time before we got together so adjusting to the back and forth of being together and alone for a few weeks or a couple of months at a time was probably a little easier for me than it is for some. Sure I'd shed a tear or two, but I always had things to keep me busy and I tried not to add any extra stress to the situation by getting too emotional.

When it was time to pick him up for deployment R&R, I had just learned a couple weeks before that we could go up to the gate to wait. It was an opportunity that I was not going to miss. We only had five hours notice that he was coming home two days early. I'll write another post one of these days about the chaos and stress that caused, not that we weren't thrilled that he would be home sooner than expected especially the week before Christmas.

I will say my memories of the entire R&R seem like they are filtered through a weird lens of exhaustion, anticipation, stress, dizzy happiness and apprehension of the quickly passing days. I remember sweet details of his arrival but the most painful and poignant moment came when we said goodbye.

The airport was pretty quiet that early morning. Quiet for one of the largest airports in the world that is. We were rushing and running behind. Everything was slower than it needed to be and to make things worse, the agent didn't mention that his flight was departing from another terminal. So by the time we got to the gate the boarding area was empty and the flight was probably a minute or two from closing it's doors. We only had time for a quick hug and kiss.

Of course both of us girls started crying and hugging our Daddy. Just then two female passengers walked up. We were standing there clinging to our Daddy and it was just us, the gate agent and these two women in the cavernous waiting area. When the two women realized who we were and what was happening they started crying.

It was the weirdest, sweetest, most uncomfortable and yet comforting thing ever. I felt like suddenly my little clan was acting out the tearjerker goodbye scene from Act of Valor, Army Wives or a cable holiday movie about the military family saying goodbye to their husband and dad -- the clincher scene the director knows will break his audience's hearts and bring everyone to tears. You know the scene where the LCDR Rorke says goodbye to his pregnant wife, Frank and Denise exchange their cards, Roxy begs Trevor to come back to her, etc.

There was a little part of me that got totally distracted. For a split second I wasn't in our goodbye anymore, I was locked in eye contact with this crying stranger behind us. I was realizing that our family privacy was a public spectacle. I was realizing that someone else felt our pain, our grief, our sadness. (I can't even write about this still without crying.) It was the craziest mix of compassion and violation that I have ever felt. I wasn't mad at those women for seeing us or for crying, I just felt on the spot. Suddenly, maybe for the first time, I was "Oh that poor military wife and little girl." Maybe it was that outpouring of sadness and pity that so caught me off guard and at the same time made me feel better. I still don't know what to make of that flash of mixed emotions I felt that day.

The entire scene lasted no longer than one minute. And then my Mr. Hart, our Daddy, walked through the gate and off to the second half of deployment with the two ladies right behind him. Clementine and I stood and waited, hoping to get another glimpse but the layout of the gate area made it impossible. We stood for a few minutes, she cried. We didn't really know what to do with ourselves. It was as if we'd been on a roller coaster, riding it for two straight weeks. Then the ride came to it's usual rough and screeching end, we stepped off and stood on the platform, dizzy, confused and a little lost.

We were quickly thrown back into our anonymity and no one knew who we were or what we'd just been through. We stood and stared at the plane. She cried on and off in big waves. We slowly started the long journey back to the other terminal where our car was parked. It all went by so quickly. We were back in our neighborhood within minutes due to the complete lack of traffic on the freeway and it wasn't even 7 AM yet.

There weren't many places to go and going straight home seemed a little empty and sad. So we stopped at one of the only places open at that early hour, the donut shop. It was filled with homeless people, who were obviously very happy to have somewhere warm to hang out at that early hour. They were very chatty and some a little scary.  We bought more donuts than we could possibly eat and sat in the car and ate donuts and drank chocolate milk until we felt a little sick. Then we packed up the rest and went home to face our suddenly very quiet little home without him.

Even though there were only five of us on scene, this was our most public, on-the-spot goodbye ever. That and the wailing little boy crying "Dadddyyyyyy," over and over when we first sent them off on deployment will be two of the most powerfully emotional memories I keep with me from our time as a deployed military family.