doin' it & doin' it & doin' it well

I was driving home the other evening and it struck me, quite suddenly, "I am doing it. I am really doing it." By 'doing it' I mean, going through a year-long deployment. The feeling that accompanied that thought was a proud one, one that made me grin to myself as I drove through the backwoods of Germany.

If you had asked me back in January, if I thought that I would be anywhere near to the adjective "okay" a few weeks into the deployment, I would have laughed bitterly in your face. The weeks, months even, leading up to the highly-anticipated, much-dreaded goodbye were some of the absolute most dismal and frightening points in the Lizack timeline to date. I'm really not sure that I have ever cried so much in my 24 years of being on this earth than I did in those dark, late days of January.

I remember lying awake at night, trying desperately to memorize the shape of his lips and the curve of his fingers on my waist. I remember fervently praying, pleading, making random deals with God to prevent this deployment from happening. I remember the hot tears that sprung to my eyes when I even thought about not being with my best friend for an entire year. I remember breaking down into heaving sobs outside of the commissary after realizing the food I had just purchased would expire after he left, and I'd have to eat it alone. I remember obsessing over the "last" everything. "Today is our last Monday together, this is the last time we'll eat here together, this is the last time we'll sleep together, this is the last time I'll watch him shave." I could go on & on with how many "lasts" I created for us that final week. I remember the way my heart clinched, stomach flopped, and tears rolled the day he came home wearing his black, infrared flag patch.

The day we said our goodbye was chilly and grey, and my contacts had clouded over by 9 AM. I was leaving that day for a weekend trip to Dublin with some friends, (friends so amazing, they deserve, and will receive, their own post soon) so Zack & I clutched each other outside of Gate A at Frankfurt Hahn, had a hurried kiss, and I choked back sobs as I watched him walk down the hallway.

Something about the goodbye didn't feel right. While obviously there are very few people who would ever feel "good" about saying goodbye for a year, there was this critical feeling of settlement I knew I needed to have, and I just did not. I quickly found out why within minutes of landing back in Germany after our trip. To make a long, annoyingly complicated, and stressful story short: Zack's company did not deploy when originally scheduled, so he actually was home the entire weekend I was gone.

Luckily, we both possess too much zeal for our own good, and arranged it to where we could get a final, "for-real" goodbye. I tried my best to look pretty before seeing him again, but there is only so much you can do with having had little to no sleep, crying fits that have occurred every hour on the hour for four days, and a heart that isn't sure if it's going to, or wants to, keep beating. Still, I got in our car and drove quickly through the inky night to where he was. I hardly dared to breathe as I waited for him to come to the car. I looked down and saw that my heart was pounding so hard it was causing the little charm on my necklace to flit back and forth. Finally he came, and we had our moment. We kissed, we cried (okay, so maybe it was just me crying, but for the sake of the story I shall pretend he was crying too), we laughed, we held on to each other tight until it was time to go. That goodbye felt firm, final, and peaceful. I didn't cry as I drove away, I felt this overwhelming sense of calm rush through me.

This was happening, it really was. My husband was leaving me for 365 days. And I was okay.

I am okay. Far better than I could have ever anticipated. Of course there are days I feel sad, but not that debilitating sorrow I used to feel towards the deployment even when his body was still by my side. It's a moment of sadness in which a few tears might escape when I find an old note he wrote me, or my heart might painfully twinge when I hear his voice in my head, "Jus leeeesten!", but it usually passes quickly and I resume my everyday life, sans Zack.

Yes, we are doing this deployment. And yes we are doing it well, as well as we know how.