MIAMI — Juanito still cries out at night.
He just turned 2, and speaks few words, but his mother Melissa Rivadeneira, 26, can sense why he acts out.
“He feels all the pain that I feel,” Rivadeneira says.
On Nov. 13, 2010, her husband – Juanito’s dad, U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Juan Rivadeneira of Davie, Fla. – was killed in Kandahar, Afghanistan, attacked by a suicide bomber wearing an explosive vest. He was 27 and died four days short of the couple’s two-year wedding anniversary.
Cinthia Gaitan, 27, often replays the last voicemail her husband Sgt. Amaru Aguilar, 26, left her while stationed in Afghanistan.
He tells her: “I love you, Babe.”
A day after leaving the message, Aguilar, of Miami's Kendall suburb, was killed when his unit came under enemy fire in Kandahar province. That was less than three weeks ago, on May 13. He leaves 9-month old Andres, a boy with cherubic cheeks and coffee-brown eyes, whom many describe as his father’s spitting image.
Gaitan has saved the voicemail on her computer so Andres will at least know his father’s voice.
On Memorial Day, Raymond Clamens, 37, and his three children will spend the day as most families do: joining relatives in South Florida for a cookout.
The single father has strived to raise his kids —Victoria, 11, Lana, 12, and Ayinde, 17— with a sense of normalcy after their mother Lillian Clamens, 35, a staff sergeant in the U.S. Army Reserve, was killed during a rocket attack in Baghdad. She died Oct. 10, 2007, two days before she was scheduled to return to Homestead.
“They always honor her memory in everything they do,” Clamens said of his children.
More than 6,000 U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq and Afghanistan since the start of those conflicts. But often unaccounted in all of the casualty reports and statistics is the emotional toll on spouses and children who are left behind.
Not since the Vietnam War, which spanned two decades and claimed the lives of close to 58,000 U.S. soldiers, has the country experienced a wave of fallen soldiers numbering in the thousands.
Many of the men and women on the front lines of Iraq and Afghanistan are barely old enough to remember the yearlong Gulf War in Kuwait and Iraq, which lasted from 1990 to ’91 and resulted in the deaths of 250 U.S. soldiers.
Unlike previous generations of war widows, this decade’s legion of surviving spouses have an online community to lean on.
They light virtual candles and leave digital roses on tribute websites like Legacy.com. Online journals offer an outlet for emotions, and their support network is no longer limited to those who live close by, but extends to friends made on social networking sites like Facebook.
Rivadeneira finds comfort by leaving love letters on the guestbook of her husband’s online obituary.
“My love, the days pass by and I miss you more each day,” she wrote him on April 25. “It’s hard without you. . . it hurts me to think you’re not coming back home to us. I wish dreams could come true and we could have you here with us again!”
It was in a dream that Rivadeneira first sensed the nightmare that would soon unfurl for her young family.
“I dreamt that he told me, ‘Baby, I have to go,’ ” she said through tears. “I woke up nervous, and it was hard for me to go back to sleep that night.”
A couple of days later, military officers arrived at her doorstep to break the awful news.
CONNECTIONS
In wars past, widows were left with handwritten letters or the memory of phone calls. But in today’s wars, where soldiers have access to Webcams and instant messaging, spouses like Rivadeneira, Gaitan and Clamens have had a more visible connection with their loved ones overseas. They not only hear and read the accounts of war, they can see the worn faces and fatigued expressions over video chats.
“It’s almost like he knew,” Rivadeneira said of her last video call with Juan. “It was like he was saying his goodbyes. He made sure my mom and siblings got on the call, too, and he asked them to always look after me and Juanito.”
Although her in-laws live in Davie, Rivadeneira ultimately decided on moving back to the last place she and her husband shared a home — Fort Campbell, Ky.
“I wanted to come back to the last place we were together as a family,” she said. “To have all those good memories back.”
For now, Rivadeneira plans on staying close to Fort Campbell, where Juanito can play with other military children at the local day care, and where she has made trusted friends with other military widows.
While staying close to Juan’s old base provides Rivadeneira physical access to a support system, different web projects are connecting surviving spouses throughout the world.
Not wanting to “sit in a room with fluorescent lighting learning what grief is,” Taryn Davis, 25, founded the American Widow Project in 2008. Davis founded the group as part of her own healing process after her husband Michael, an Army corporal, was killed in a roadside bombing in Baghdad. He was 21.
The nonprofit’s website helps connect military widows by organizing small outings in different cities that keep in mind the young age of so many of today’s widows.
‘STIGMA’
“There’s a stigma that comes along with the word ‘widow,’ ” said Davis, who lives in Texas. “You tend to think of someone in their 70s and 80s, but a huge percentage of today’s widows are in their 20s and 30s.”
Skydiving, parasailing, and zip-lining are some of the outings the American Widow Project has organized for some 750 military widows.
“People see us, and they see a group of vibrant, dynamic women, and they ask us if we’re part of a sorority,” Davis said of the widow retreats. “When we tell them we’re a group of military widows, a lot of times people don’t know how to react. . . but we’re here to tell widows it’s OK to smile, it’s OK to laugh . . . it’s about embracing our widowhood and finding meaning in life again.”
For many widows and widowers, the meaning of life and motivation to move ahead is centered on raising their children and making sure they never forget their fallen mom or dad.
Preserving his wife’s memory is important to Clamens, who often takes his children to leave fresh flowers at their mother’s grave site in Doral.
“Their mom is a constant presence in their lives,” Clamens said. “They got a lot of stuff from the Army they still hold onto — memorial stuff, pictures, coins.”
Clamens has his children take part in activities that he hopes lets them communicate their pain. For example, they still write letters to her, and they’ve attended summer camps geared toward children who have lost a parent in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Clamens, a proud Army man who served in Bosnia, Somalia and Haiti, fell in love with Lillian’s “super bright smile” when the two met as soldiers working at the U.S. Army base in Vilseck, Germany in 1996. The couple embraced their military lifestyle, but not even combat training could prepare Raymond for the wounds of losing a wife.
“It’s still a little overwhelming either way,” he said.
While the state and federal government cannot wipe out those overwhelming feelings of loss, they try to step in and ease some of the financial stresses facing families.
Spouses can receive $100,000 from the federal government as a death gratuity and they may receive $400,000 from a service member’s life insurance policy.
The state also offers free tuition at any public university for the children and spouses of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in most cases widows are exempt from paying property taxes on a homesteaded property.
Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the state has helped 289 families of fallen service members, according to the Florida Department of Veteran Affairs.
For Gaitan, all the shuffle of paperwork that comes with applying for state and federal military benefits can wait. She has been too busy finalizing the June funeral arrangements at Arlington National Cemetery and responding to the Facebook messages she receives from soldiers who served with her husband.
“I didn’t even want to think about paperwork,” Gaitan said of the first time the Army’s casualty assistance officers visited her home.
It’s still too soon after Aguilar’s death, to start talking about future plans. Still, she’s certain she wants to stay in Miami long enough to finish her pre-law studies at Miami-Dade College and become a paralegal. She doesn’t want her life to be defined as being a “young widow.”
“I never imagined myself being a young widow,” Gaitan said. “ ‘Young widow,’ it’s strange for me to even say it.”
She fell in love with Agular because he made her laugh when they worked together as Reservists. They found comfort in their shared backgrounds; both hailed from Nicaragua and grew up in Southwest Miami-Dade.
As a soldier herself, Gaitlan tries to keep a strong face and composure when talking about losing the love of her life — but as a mother, she cries when she talks about her son not knowing his dad.
Not just one day a year, but every day, Gaitlan said she will remind Andres about his dad.
Holding her sleeping son in her arms she says: “He will always know his dad was a hero.”
