For one war widow, moving on is a marathon

In DUPONT, Wash.

Lisa Hallett’s 26-mile run begins before sunrise in a gravel parking lot on the edge of Puget Sound.

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Lisa Hallett recounts the day she found out that her husband was killed in Afghanistan. (Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post)

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Friends and family gather to run and to pray for the deceased from the Iraq and Afghan wars.(Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post)

She climbs a steep hill bracketed by thick woods that double as an Army training range. By 6 a.m., she is moving through streets clogged with soldiers commuting to nearby Joint Base Lewis-McChord.

Hours pass, and the ache in her legs builds. A cold morning rain soaks her shirt. Around Mile 14, she turns onto a narrow running trail. The nervous energy that buzzes in her head starts to fade.

It is at this moment that he arrives. He is walking next to her in a red shirt and khaki shorts.

“Stop walking,” she tells him. “I am running as fast as I can, and you are always walking. It makes me feel bad.”

The man she is seeing has been dead nearly three years. He is her husband, Capt. John L. Hallett III, who was killed in August 2009 in Afghanistan when insurgents exploded a bomb underneath his armored vehicle. In those first days, she wondered if she’d ever sleep again. She spent much of the first year clinging to the irrational hope that he might return.

Now the war that claimed John’s life is increasingly an afterthought, and Lisa, 31, is one of thousands of widows from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq trying to get on with their lives. Everyone seems to be moving on, including the other soldiers and spouses from John’s unit who have left for other bases and other assignments. Lisa, meanwhile, remains.

“Stuck” is the word she uses sometimes to describe her life. It is a life in which she is in constant motion, trying to get people to remember wars they’d rather forget and the soldiers who have died in them.

She sometimes wonders if she should be handling her loss better. Three other soldiers were killed in the blast that killed John. In the first months after he died, Lisa and another woman who was widowed in the same explosion often stayed up late exchanging messages on Facebook. They discussed what to do with their husbands’ clothes, whether to move away from Lewis-McChord and when to take off their wedding rings.

“I will never find the right person if I leave this ring on my finger. But I can’t take it off,” Lisa wrote. “I don’t want to live this life pining for a relationship that no longer exists. I don’t want to spend forever feeling sorry for myself.”

“I think you need to set a date for that ring to come off,” her friend replied.

Today her friend is married and pregnant, and Lisa wonders why that kind of future seems so far away for her. She still wears her wedding ring, though on her right hand; her husband’s uniform is in a pile on her bedroom floor; and she writes in her journal in the form of a letter to John: “It’s hard sometimes seeing other people’s lives move forward when I still feel stuck, crippled by the anxiety of a life without you.”

On a Saturday morning, she is rushing to get her children out of the door. Heidi, who is almost 3, won’t finish her cereal. Bryce, 4, can’t find his T-ball shirt. Jackson, 6, is struggling to ram his feet into his baseball cleats.