Cold Ground for a Summer Love

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."