Because she couldn’t be gone.
The details of the rest of that night were sketchy. From what they’d told him later, they’d had to sedate him and physically remove him from Kathleen’s room after several hours. He vaguely remembered screaming at Father Murphy, cursing him to Hell for daring to suggest Kathleen was with God now. God couldn’t have her, because she was his.
All of his life he’d never lost his faith. Had never questioned Him or his purpose, even when he was a prisoner of war. Not when the skin had been flayed from his back; not when small, sharp sticks had demonstrated the true meaning of excruciating over and over again. None of that compared to this.
No beneficent God could command such a thing as this.
He woke up a full twenty hours later in Brian’s house. At first he was disoriented, but when he saw Brian and Charlie talking in hushed tones, it all came back to him. It was then he knew the horrific nightmares had been true.
They didn’t bother trying to console him. They must have known how impossible a task that would have been -—especially Brian, who had lost his wife less than a year earlier. However, when Jack, overcome by the crushing grief, went for the loaded gun Brian kept on the top shelf in the kitchen, they did remind him that he had seven grieving, scared boys who had just lost their mother.
Jack didn’t know how he would do it. He didn’t know how he was going to make it through another minute, let alone face his boys. He’d failed them, failed them all.
That was the first time he heard Kathleen’s voice in his head. “Aye, you will do this, mo croie beloved. You will do this for me.”
He didn’t know how he did it, but he did. He went home to his sons, her boys, and somehow, they made it through the next few days. He did what he needed to do, little more than a semi-functional zombie.
He spoke with the priest. Erin took care of her clothes. The funeral home director, a friend of his father’s, took care of everything else. Jack just signed whatever they told him to.
The days were dark and cold, filled with a thousand times more pain and suffering than anything he’d ever experienced. Then, the thought of seeing Kathleen again was the only thing that got him through. That same desire was a temptation he fought every minute of every day. His boys were his strength, the only reason he continued to draw breath. That, and the haunting whispers and warnings of his croie, echoing in his heart as well as his mind: “If you chose that path, Jack, then I will be forever lost.”
So he endured. One agonizing moment at a time. The pain never went away, but he learned to live with it. He focused on their boys and did the best he could.
Days became weeks. Weeks became months. Months became years.
It was Kathleen who eventually brought him back to his faith, because it went hand in hand with the belief that he would see her again.
One by one he saw their sons follow in his footsteps. Stood proudly as each one enlisted and became a SEAL. Watched as they followed their natural talents and became what they were destined to be. And finally, as their commitments were satisfied, accepted them into what had become the unofficial family “business.”
Kathleen was there for all of it, in his heart and theirs, filled with the same pride and love for them she’d always had. He didn’t worry so much about them, knowing their mother was keeping a special eye on them.
Now they were grown men with families of their own.
But through it all, he never forgot what she’d said to him that night.
––––––––
October 2015
Pine Ridge
“You lied, Kathleen,” Jack whispered into the empty room.
“I didn’t lie to you, Jack. Not intentionally.”
Jack didn’t need to open his eyes to see her. Happier visions of Kathleen filled his mind, wiping away the image of her on that hospital bed. Kathleen at eighteen, approaching him at that block party so many years ago. Looking lovingly into his eyes at their wedding. Catching him staring at her while reading bedtime stories to the boys.
They’d had so little time together, but the time they did have were still the best years of his life. What they’d lacked in quantity, they’d had in quality.
“You said you’d be fine. You weren’t.” It was only afterward that he’d realized how wrong he’d been in thinking that pneumonia was no longer a deadly killer. That in viral form, antibiotics were useless against it. That sometimes, modern medicine was no more effective than the bloodletting treatments of two hundred years ago.
“No,” she agreed. “I wasn’t.”
“You should have taken better care of yourself. I should have taken better care of you.” The familiar ache in his chest flared, slicing deep along his still-healing wounds, twenty-five years later. All of the ‘should haves’ and ‘what-ifs’ billowed beneath the wires holding his breastbone together.