For Va. Family, Perpetual Days Of Anguish

Daughter Dawnita, left, mother Donna and son C.J. Gilmore gather around what was Cornell Gilmore's recliner in the loft of the family's home. Donna saw to it that her children returned to school soon after his death. "They have their lives to live, and I have mine, whatever this new life is going to be," she said. (Rich Lipski -- The Washington Post)

"The one thing that angers me about everything is that probably, if the war had never been declared over, Cornell wouldn't have been over there," she said. "They wouldn't have had that type of inspection he was doing if we were still at war. "

Death, of course, is a prospect for any military family, the unspoken reality they all have to live with. Her husband had served in the 1st Armored Division in Desert Storm, but that conflict "had a totally different feel -- we didn't have the casualties," she said. In his position with the JAG Corps, the group that oversees the Army's courts and legal affairs, he had seemed safe from the current dangers.

"You hate to compare it to Vietnam," she said, " . . . but it seems to me we're a few little people in a big country that doesn't belong to us, where we can't tell sometimes who the enemy is."

Beyond that, the Gilmores are reluctant to criticize the military or the government. Donna said that although she will always "love the soldiers and their families, the military bureaucracy is what it is." Looking forward to voting in her first presidential election, Dawnita would not say which candidate she supports, only that everyone "should be sure to vote."

The fifth and sixth months passed, and Donna switched from counting days without her husband to counting months. C.J. decided to stick with his music after all; Dawnita seemed on a steady course. Cards still arrived from soldiers and their families. Reports of more military deaths in Iraq continued to lead the news.

Fridays, their old date night and the day on which he died, were still hard; Sundays, too, "because we lived in church." It was hard to hear her brothers-in-law speak on the telephone -- they sounded so much like Cornell, it made her catch her breath. She never knew when something would hit her like that: Just a few weeks ago, as she sat in her hairdresser's shop, Stevie Wonder came on the radio, singing "Ribbon in the Sky," one of the couple's special songs, and she had to leave the room quickly to break down in private.

She still talked to him. She thought about how she used to chide him for sneaking too many cookies, concerned for his health. "But now I tell him, 'Honey, I wish I could give you all the cookies you wanted right now.' "

Gradually, it became easier for the three family members to talk about him with other people, to sit and laugh and sometimes cry a little, surrounded by his photographs. There was still "a crash" afterward, they said, but it was not quite as devastating. They were sure sometimes they could hear him telling them to "come on, team!"

"Dad was not a bitter person -- the person I remember was the epitome of happiness," Dawnita said. "So why would I have a horrible life after this? Because you know, all there is left to do is stay focused on God's work . . . and number two, do everything Dad taught me.

"And like he always said," and here she paused and her mother and brother joined in to chant in unison Sgt. Maj. Gilmore's famous exit line: "Go forth -- and have a nice day."