<bgsound src="http://www.freewebs.com/dj-lee/bad2bone.mp3" loop="infinite">
This website is maintained by Aaron's Gold Star family with assitance from web volunteer JJ Davis
This website is a memorial to the life of U.S. Army Cpl. Aaron D. Gautier
19, of Hampton, Virginia.
Aaron was assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment, 4th Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, Fort Lewis, Washington and gave the ultimate sacrifice while protecting out freedom on May 17, 2007 in Baghdad of wounds sustained when his mounted patrol came in contact with enemy forces using small-arms fire and an improvised explosive device.
There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it...
And you thought Jean-Claude Van Damme looked cool in "Universal Soldier"...
Aaron enlisted in the Army several months shy of his 18th birthday. He was shipped off to Iraq with the Washington-based 2nd Infantry Division.
At 19 years old, he had learned what many of us do not learn in an entire lifetime: How to live honorably and with courage...
The Patriot Guard Riders at Aaron's funeral - May, 2007
"These kids join to fight for The United States of America and all the patriotic terms... But they die for their friends next to them..." - John Phelps, Gold-Star father
The memorial in Iraq for Aaron and Pfc. Jonathan V. Hamm, who died the same day, also in Bahgdad
Aaron loved roller-coasters and the New York Yankees...
"Aaron was assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment, 4th Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, Fort Lewis, WA - But his true home was in Hampton Roads..." - Aaron's Gold Star mom, Tina
The term "Hampton Roads" is a centuries-old designation that originated when the region was a struggling English outpost nearly four hundred years ago. The name is believed to have originated from the combination of two separate words.
The word "Hampton" honors one of the founders of the Virginia Company of London and a great supporter of the colonization of Virginia, Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton. In the easternmost part of the new colony, downstream from Jamestown, the early administrative center was known as Elizabeth Cittie [sic], named for Princess Elizabeth, the daughter of King James I, and formally designated by the Virginia Company in 1619. (The Elizabeth River was also named for the princess).
The town at the center of Elizabeth Cittie became known as simply "Hampton", and a nearby waterway was designated Hampton Creek (also known as Hampton River). The town (and later city) of Hampton was the county seat of Elizabeth City County for over 300 years, until they were politically consolidated into the current large independent city known as Hampton, Virginia in 1952. The City of Hampton thus became one of the large Seven Cities of Hampton Roads, of which four others also grew to the larger sizes by consolidating with neighboring jurisdictions such as counties and towns in the mid-twentieth century...
The love that once was born can not die. For it has become part of us, of our life.
Woven into the very texture of our being...
Aaron - 6 months old
Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal...
The Honor and Remember flag pole, part of the Aaron Gautier Memorial currently being constructed at Aaron's family's home. Check back with us as more pictures are posted...
If 50 years from now you are a million miles away, and need the light of a special one to brighten up your day....
Just close your eyes and feel your heart and honestly believe... There's a piece of me inside your heart, and that piece will never leave...
- Anonymous
Aaron and his sister, Alexis
A baby boy is a blank check made payable to the human race...
- Barbara Christine Seifert
All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination, Imagination is the workshop of your mind, capable of turning mind energy into accomplishment and wealth...
Aaron and SSG Coady (his Drill Sergeant) on graduation day - Fort Benning, GA
Some choices we live not only once but a thousand times over, remembering them for the rest of our lives....
Transcript from the Nancy Grace show - 6/23/09
"Youth is, after all, just a moment, but it is the moment, the spark, that you always carry in your heart..."
- Raisa M. Gorbachev
Aaron in 1997
"It takes a long time to become young..."
- Pablo Picasso
Aaron on his 36 hour weekend pass during Basic Training - Fort Benning, GA
The Purple Heart is a United States military decoration awarded in the name of the President to those who have been wounded or killed while serving on or after April 5, 1917 with the U.S. military. The National Purple Heart Hall of Honor is located in New Windsor, New York.
The original idea for the Purple Heart (the Badge of Military Merit) is the oldest symbol and award that is still given to members of the U.S. military, surpassed in history only by the long obsolete Fidelity Medallion.
"Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee... calls back the lovely April of her prime..."
- William Shakespeare
"When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her children..."
- Sophia Loren
"In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed forever..."
- I Corinthians 15:52
What the eye does not admire the heart does not desire...
"Mama, Mama" is a universal cry of the dying in battle. Men maimed and broken scream for their mothers, who mercifully can't hear them. Posthumous medals for valor muffle the child and honor the warrior, but for a Gold Star Mother, ribbons and ceremony are as short-lived as the cherished remains being buried.
Without being a statistic, she, too, is a casualty of war. Heard in her strangled weeping are guttural pleas to God to ease the pain of losing a child. For this heartbroken woman, a coffin, even one draped in the American flag and carried by white-gloved Marines, is the grim totality of her forced enlistment into a war that breeched the refuge of home.
The bomb in this woman's living room is the conspicuous absence of her baby. Yes, baby, because no matter how old or how long deceased, the person for whom Taps are played only sleeps in his mother's heart. Naptime is eternity.
Mother's Day becomes a sad reminder and an accolade for her supreme contribution to patriotism. Or maybe it's a time to be angry and resentful — why my son or daughter? Pride crumples in a darkened room filled with pictures of a young man or woman whose potential bled out onto a foreign soil.
This imagined scenario is a relentless assault on memories of all the boo-boos she kissed and Superman Band-Aids plastered on scraped knees and dinged elbows. If only Mama could have been there to fix things, to make them better, to chase the monster away, to kiss away hurts one more time, then, maybe she, too, can stop crying.
Questions and accusations stifle remorse, but tears, like water, ever the enemy of rock, wear down resistance. Solace wrestles with acceptance, but grief takes on a presence of its own. Guided by ghosts, it is either torment or release from them.
When burying a child, remembrance is love and guilt is debilitating; however, my quantifying and simplifying a mother's loss and angst seems as unsentimental as some pot-bellied politician pontificating on Memorial Day.
How can anyone suppose a wound so deep that it bleeds concurrently with every thought of the initial one? Such trauma is personal, so much so, empathy even seems contrived.
In the middle of the night, this woman still awakens to the imagined cries of her baby, only to clutch a pillow instead. Holidays are a poignant reminder of her diminished family; her unwitting contribution to a distant conflict that ignored every mother's boundaries and snatched innocence as abruptly as the life she mourns. Her naiveté is six-feet under as well. The flag so gloriously waving in front of her home casts a shadow.
This Mother's Day, there are women embracing memories rather than their children. These mothers fully understand the costs of war and wonder if the old generals and politicians who enact them ever walk in a military cemetery and sob aloud? Do their sons and daughters wear our country's uniform and see active duty?
Do beribboned chests ever exhale and tremble at the sight of an old woman kneeling at Arlington? Her fingers lovingly touching a carved name as if it were warm and whispering back to her.
Maybe it is; maybe that's why her face is pressed against the stone so she can once again hear, "Mama, Mama."
- A Gold Star Mom from New Braunfels, Texas
Aaron and his mother, Tina - 1997
Tina's trust and faith made this tribute site possible
Honor isn't about making the right choices. It's about dealing with the consequences...
Another world, some other time
You lay your sanity on the line
Familiar faces, familiar sights
Reach back, remember with all your might...
And then you sense a change
Nothing feels the same
All your dreams are strange
Love comes walking in...
- Van Halen, 1986
Lindsey and Aaron
This website is a memorial to the life of U.S. Army Cpl. Aaron D. Gautier
19, of Hampton, Virginia.
Aaron was assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment, 4th Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, Fort Lewis, Washington and gave the ultimate sacrifice while protecting out freedom on May 17, 2007 in Baghdad of wounds sustained when his mounted patrol came in contact with enemy forces using small-arms fire and an improvised explosive device.
There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it...
And you thought Jean-Claude Van Damme looked cool in "Universal Soldier"...
Aaron enlisted in the Army several months shy of his 18th birthday. He was shipped off to Iraq with the Washington-based 2nd Infantry Division.
At 19 years old, he had learned what many of us do not learn in an entire lifetime: How to live honorably and with courage...
The Patriot Guard Riders at Aaron's funeral - May, 2007
"These kids join to fight for The United States of America and all the patriotic terms... But they die for their friends next to them..." - John Phelps, Gold-Star father
The memorial in Iraq for Aaron and Pfc. Jonathan V. Hamm, who died the same day, also in Bahgdad
Aaron loved roller-coasters and the New York Yankees...
"Aaron was assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment, 4th Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, Fort Lewis, WA - But his true home was in Hampton Roads..." - Aaron's Gold Star mom, Tina
The term "Hampton Roads" is a centuries-old designation that originated when the region was a struggling English outpost nearly four hundred years ago. The name is believed to have originated from the combination of two separate words.
The word "Hampton" honors one of the founders of the Virginia Company of London and a great supporter of the colonization of Virginia, Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton. In the easternmost part of the new colony, downstream from Jamestown, the early administrative center was known as Elizabeth Cittie [sic], named for Princess Elizabeth, the daughter of King James I, and formally designated by the Virginia Company in 1619. (The Elizabeth River was also named for the princess).
The town at the center of Elizabeth Cittie became known as simply "Hampton", and a nearby waterway was designated Hampton Creek (also known as Hampton River). The town (and later city) of Hampton was the county seat of Elizabeth City County for over 300 years, until they were politically consolidated into the current large independent city known as Hampton, Virginia in 1952. The City of Hampton thus became one of the large Seven Cities of Hampton Roads, of which four others also grew to the larger sizes by consolidating with neighboring jurisdictions such as counties and towns in the mid-twentieth century...
The love that once was born can not die. For it has become part of us, of our life.
Woven into the very texture of our being...
Aaron - 6 months old
Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal...
The Honor and Remember flag pole, part of the Aaron Gautier Memorial currently being constructed at Aaron's family's home. Check back with us as more pictures are posted...
If 50 years from now you are a million miles away, and need the light of a special one to brighten up your day....
Just close your eyes and feel your heart and honestly believe... There's a piece of me inside your heart, and that piece will never leave...
- Anonymous
Aaron and his sister, Alexis
A baby boy is a blank check made payable to the human race...
- Barbara Christine Seifert
All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination, Imagination is the workshop of your mind, capable of turning mind energy into accomplishment and wealth...
Aaron and SSG Coady (his Drill Sergeant) on graduation day - Fort Benning, GA
Some choices we live not only once but a thousand times over, remembering them for the rest of our lives....
Transcript from the Nancy Grace show - 6/23/09
"Youth is, after all, just a moment, but it is the moment, the spark, that you always carry in your heart..."
- Raisa M. Gorbachev
Aaron in 1997
"It takes a long time to become young..."
- Pablo Picasso
Aaron on his 36 hour weekend pass during Basic Training - Fort Benning, GA
The Purple Heart is a United States military decoration awarded in the name of the President to those who have been wounded or killed while serving on or after April 5, 1917 with the U.S. military. The National Purple Heart Hall of Honor is located in New Windsor, New York.
The original idea for the Purple Heart (the Badge of Military Merit) is the oldest symbol and award that is still given to members of the U.S. military, surpassed in history only by the long obsolete Fidelity Medallion.
"Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee... calls back the lovely April of her prime..."
- William Shakespeare
"When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her children..."
- Sophia Loren
"In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed forever..."
- I Corinthians 15:52
What the eye does not admire the heart does not desire...
"Mama, Mama" is a universal cry of the dying in battle. Men maimed and broken scream for their mothers, who mercifully can't hear them. Posthumous medals for valor muffle the child and honor the warrior, but for a Gold Star Mother, ribbons and ceremony are as short-lived as the cherished remains being buried.
Without being a statistic, she, too, is a casualty of war. Heard in her strangled weeping are guttural pleas to God to ease the pain of losing a child. For this heartbroken woman, a coffin, even one draped in the American flag and carried by white-gloved Marines, is the grim totality of her forced enlistment into a war that breeched the refuge of home.
The bomb in this woman's living room is the conspicuous absence of her baby. Yes, baby, because no matter how old or how long deceased, the person for whom Taps are played only sleeps in his mother's heart. Naptime is eternity.
Mother's Day becomes a sad reminder and an accolade for her supreme contribution to patriotism. Or maybe it's a time to be angry and resentful — why my son or daughter? Pride crumples in a darkened room filled with pictures of a young man or woman whose potential bled out onto a foreign soil.
This imagined scenario is a relentless assault on memories of all the boo-boos she kissed and Superman Band-Aids plastered on scraped knees and dinged elbows. If only Mama could have been there to fix things, to make them better, to chase the monster away, to kiss away hurts one more time, then, maybe she, too, can stop crying.
Questions and accusations stifle remorse, but tears, like water, ever the enemy of rock, wear down resistance. Solace wrestles with acceptance, but grief takes on a presence of its own. Guided by ghosts, it is either torment or release from them.
When burying a child, remembrance is love and guilt is debilitating; however, my quantifying and simplifying a mother's loss and angst seems as unsentimental as some pot-bellied politician pontificating on Memorial Day.
How can anyone suppose a wound so deep that it bleeds concurrently with every thought of the initial one? Such trauma is personal, so much so, empathy even seems contrived.
In the middle of the night, this woman still awakens to the imagined cries of her baby, only to clutch a pillow instead. Holidays are a poignant reminder of her diminished family; her unwitting contribution to a distant conflict that ignored every mother's boundaries and snatched innocence as abruptly as the life she mourns. Her naiveté is six-feet under as well. The flag so gloriously waving in front of her home casts a shadow.
This Mother's Day, there are women embracing memories rather than their children. These mothers fully understand the costs of war and wonder if the old generals and politicians who enact them ever walk in a military cemetery and sob aloud? Do their sons and daughters wear our country's uniform and see active duty?
Do beribboned chests ever exhale and tremble at the sight of an old woman kneeling at Arlington? Her fingers lovingly touching a carved name as if it were warm and whispering back to her.
Maybe it is; maybe that's why her face is pressed against the stone so she can once again hear, "Mama, Mama."
- A Gold Star Mom from New Braunfels, Texas
Aaron and his mother, Tina - 1997
Tina's trust and faith made this tribute site possible
Honor isn't about making the right choices. It's about dealing with the consequences...
Another world, some other time
You lay your sanity on the line
Familiar faces, familiar sights
Reach back, remember with all your might...
And then you sense a change
Nothing feels the same
All your dreams are strange
Love comes walking in...
- Van Halen, 1986
Lindsey and Aaron
This website is a memorial to the life of U.S. Army Cpl. Aaron D. Gautier
19, of Hampton, Virginia.
Aaron was assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment, 4th Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, Fort Lewis, Washington and gave the ultimate sacrifice while protecting out freedom on May 17, 2007 in Baghdad of wounds sustained when his mounted patrol came in contact with enemy forces using small-arms fire and an improvised explosive device.
There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it...
And you thought Jean-Claude Van Damme looked cool in "Universal Soldier"...
Aaron enlisted in the Army several months shy of his 18th birthday. He was shipped off to Iraq with the Washington-based 2nd Infantry Division.
At 19 years old, he had learned what many of us do not learn in an entire lifetime: How to live honorably and with courage...
The Patriot Guard Riders at Aaron's funeral - May, 2007
"These kids join to fight for The United States of America and all the patriotic terms... But they die for their friends next to them..." - John Phelps, Gold-Star father
The memorial in Iraq for Aaron and Pfc. Jonathan V. Hamm, who died the same day, also in Bahgdad
Aaron loved roller-coasters and the New York Yankees...
"Aaron was assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment, 4th Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, Fort Lewis, WA - But his true home was in Hampton Roads..." - Aaron's Gold Star mom, Tina
The term "Hampton Roads" is a centuries-old designation that originated when the region was a struggling English outpost nearly four hundred years ago. The name is believed to have originated from the combination of two separate words.
The word "Hampton" honors one of the founders of the Virginia Company of London and a great supporter of the colonization of Virginia, Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton. In the easternmost part of the new colony, downstream from Jamestown, the early administrative center was known as Elizabeth Cittie [sic], named for Princess Elizabeth, the daughter of King James I, and formally designated by the Virginia Company in 1619. (The Elizabeth River was also named for the princess).
The town at the center of Elizabeth Cittie became known as simply "Hampton", and a nearby waterway was designated Hampton Creek (also known as Hampton River). The town (and later city) of Hampton was the county seat of Elizabeth City County for over 300 years, until they were politically consolidated into the current large independent city known as Hampton, Virginia in 1952. The City of Hampton thus became one of the large Seven Cities of Hampton Roads, of which four others also grew to the larger sizes by consolidating with neighboring jurisdictions such as counties and towns in the mid-twentieth century...
The love that once was born can not die. For it has become part of us, of our life.
Woven into the very texture of our being...
Aaron - 6 months old
Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal...
The Honor and Remember flag pole, part of the Aaron Gautier Memorial currently being constructed at Aaron's family's home. Check back with us as more pictures are posted...
If 50 years from now you are a million miles away, and need the light of a special one to brighten up your day....
Just close your eyes and feel your heart and honestly believe... There's a piece of me inside your heart, and that piece will never leave...
- Anonymous
Aaron and his sister, Alexis
A baby boy is a blank check made payable to the human race...
- Barbara Christine Seifert
All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination, Imagination is the workshop of your mind, capable of turning mind energy into accomplishment and wealth...
Aaron and SSG Coady (his Drill Sergeant) on graduation day - Fort Benning, GA
Some choices we live not only once but a thousand times over, remembering them for the rest of our lives....
Transcript from the Nancy Grace show - 6/23/09
"Youth is, after all, just a moment, but it is the moment, the spark, that you always carry in your heart..."
- Raisa M. Gorbachev
Aaron in 1997
"It takes a long time to become young..."
- Pablo Picasso
Aaron on his 36 hour weekend pass during Basic Training - Fort Benning, GA
The Purple Heart is a United States military decoration awarded in the name of the President to those who have been wounded or killed while serving on or after April 5, 1917 with the U.S. military. The National Purple Heart Hall of Honor is located in New Windsor, New York.
The original idea for the Purple Heart (the Badge of Military Merit) is the oldest symbol and award that is still given to members of the U.S. military, surpassed in history only by the long obsolete Fidelity Medallion.
"Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee... calls back the lovely April of her prime..."
- William Shakespeare
"When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her children..."
- Sophia Loren
"In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed forever..."
- I Corinthians 15:52
What the eye does not admire the heart does not desire...
"Mama, Mama" is a universal cry of the dying in battle. Men maimed and broken scream for their mothers, who mercifully can't hear them. Posthumous medals for valor muffle the child and honor the warrior, but for a Gold Star Mother, ribbons and ceremony are as short-lived as the cherished remains being buried.
Without being a statistic, she, too, is a casualty of war. Heard in her strangled weeping are guttural pleas to God to ease the pain of losing a child. For this heartbroken woman, a coffin, even one draped in the American flag and carried by white-gloved Marines, is the grim totality of her forced enlistment into a war that breeched the refuge of home.
The bomb in this woman's living room is the conspicuous absence of her baby. Yes, baby, because no matter how old or how long deceased, the person for whom Taps are played only sleeps in his mother's heart. Naptime is eternity.
Mother's Day becomes a sad reminder and an accolade for her supreme contribution to patriotism. Or maybe it's a time to be angry and resentful — why my son or daughter? Pride crumples in a darkened room filled with pictures of a young man or woman whose potential bled out onto a foreign soil.
This imagined scenario is a relentless assault on memories of all the boo-boos she kissed and Superman Band-Aids plastered on scraped knees and dinged elbows. If only Mama could have been there to fix things, to make them better, to chase the monster away, to kiss away hurts one more time, then, maybe she, too, can stop crying.
Questions and accusations stifle remorse, but tears, like water, ever the enemy of rock, wear down resistance. Solace wrestles with acceptance, but grief takes on a presence of its own. Guided by ghosts, it is either torment or release from them.
When burying a child, remembrance is love and guilt is debilitating; however, my quantifying and simplifying a mother's loss and angst seems as unsentimental as some pot-bellied politician pontificating on Memorial Day.
How can anyone suppose a wound so deep that it bleeds concurrently with every thought of the initial one? Such trauma is personal, so much so, empathy even seems contrived.
In the middle of the night, this woman still awakens to the imagined cries of her baby, only to clutch a pillow instead. Holidays are a poignant reminder of her diminished family; her unwitting contribution to a distant conflict that ignored every mother's boundaries and snatched innocence as abruptly as the life she mourns. Her naiveté is six-feet under as well. The flag so gloriously waving in front of her home casts a shadow.
This Mother's Day, there are women embracing memories rather than their children. These mothers fully understand the costs of war and wonder if the old generals and politicians who enact them ever walk in a military cemetery and sob aloud? Do their sons and daughters wear our country's uniform and see active duty?
Do beribboned chests ever exhale and tremble at the sight of an old woman kneeling at Arlington? Her fingers lovingly touching a carved name as if it were warm and whispering back to her.
Maybe it is; maybe that's why her face is pressed against the stone so she can once again hear, "Mama, Mama."
- A Gold Star Mom from New Braunfels, Texas
Aaron and his mother, Tina - 1997
Tina's trust and faith made this tribute site possible
Honor isn't about making the right choices. It's about dealing with the consequences...
Another world, some other time
You lay your sanity on the line
Familiar faces, familiar sights
Reach back, remember with all your might...
And then you sense a change
Nothing feels the same
All your dreams are strange
Love comes walking in...
- Van Halen, 1986
Lindsey and Aaron
There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it...
And you thought Jean-Claude Van Damme looked cool in "Universal Soldier"...
Aaron enlisted in the Army several months shy of his 18th birthday. He was shipped off to Iraq with the Washington-based 2nd Infantry Division.
At 19 years old, he had learned what many of us do not learn in an entire lifetime: How to live honorably and with courage...
The Patriot Guard Riders at Aaron's funeral - May, 2007
"These kids join to fight for The United States of America and all the patriotic terms... But they die for their friends next to them..." - John Phelps, Gold-Star father
The memorial in Iraq for Aaron and Pfc. Jonathan V. Hamm, who died the same day, also in Bahgdad
Aaron loved roller-coasters and the New York Yankees...
"Aaron was assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment, 4th Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, Fort Lewis, WA - But his true home was in Hampton Roads..." - Aaron's Gold Star mom, Tina
The term "Hampton Roads" is a centuries-old designation that originated when the region was a struggling English outpost nearly four hundred years ago. The name is believed to have originated from the combination of two separate words.
The word "Hampton" honors one of the founders of the Virginia Company of London and a great supporter of the colonization of Virginia, Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton. In the easternmost part of the new colony, downstream from Jamestown, the early administrative center was known as Elizabeth Cittie [sic], named for Princess Elizabeth, the daughter of King James I, and formally designated by the Virginia Company in 1619. (The Elizabeth River was also named for the princess).
The town at the center of Elizabeth Cittie became known as simply "Hampton", and a nearby waterway was designated Hampton Creek (also known as Hampton River). The town (and later city) of Hampton was the county seat of Elizabeth City County for over 300 years, until they were politically consolidated into the current large independent city known as Hampton, Virginia in 1952. The City of Hampton thus became one of the large Seven Cities of Hampton Roads, of which four others also grew to the larger sizes by consolidating with neighboring jurisdictions such as counties and towns in the mid-twentieth century...
The love that once was born can not die. For it has become part of us, of our life.
Woven into the very texture of our being...
Aaron - 6 months old
Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal...
The Honor and Remember flag pole, part of the Aaron Gautier Memorial currently being constructed at Aaron's family's home. Check back with us as more pictures are posted...
If 50 years from now you are a million miles away, and need the light of a special one to brighten up your day....
Just close your eyes and feel your heart and honestly believe... There's a piece of me inside your heart, and that piece will never leave...
- Anonymous
Aaron and his sister, Alexis
A baby boy is a blank check made payable to the human race...
- Barbara Christine Seifert
All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination, Imagination is the workshop of your mind, capable of turning mind energy into accomplishment and wealth...
Aaron and SSG Coady (his Drill Sergeant) on graduation day - Fort Benning, GA
Some choices we live not only once but a thousand times over, remembering them for the rest of our lives....
Transcript from the Nancy Grace show - 6/23/09
"Youth is, after all, just a moment, but it is the moment, the spark, that you always carry in your heart..."
- Raisa M. Gorbachev
Aaron in 1997
"It takes a long time to become young..."
- Pablo Picasso
Aaron on his 36 hour weekend pass during Basic Training - Fort Benning, GA
The Purple Heart is a United States military decoration awarded in the name of the President to those who have been wounded or killed while serving on or after April 5, 1917 with the U.S. military. The National Purple Heart Hall of Honor is located in New Windsor, New York.
The original idea for the Purple Heart (the Badge of Military Merit) is the oldest symbol and award that is still given to members of the U.S. military, surpassed in history only by the long obsolete Fidelity Medallion.
"Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee... calls back the lovely April of her prime..."
- William Shakespeare
"When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her children..."
- Sophia Loren
"In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed forever..."
- I Corinthians 15:52
What the eye does not admire the heart does not desire...
"Mama, Mama" is a universal cry of the dying in battle. Men maimed and broken scream for their mothers, who mercifully can't hear them. Posthumous medals for valor muffle the child and honor the warrior, but for a Gold Star Mother, ribbons and ceremony are as short-lived as the cherished remains being buried.
Without being a statistic, she, too, is a casualty of war. Heard in her strangled weeping are guttural pleas to God to ease the pain of losing a child. For this heartbroken woman, a coffin, even one draped in the American flag and carried by white-gloved Marines, is the grim totality of her forced enlistment into a war that breeched the refuge of home.
The bomb in this woman's living room is the conspicuous absence of her baby. Yes, baby, because no matter how old or how long deceased, the person for whom Taps are played only sleeps in his mother's heart. Naptime is eternity.
Mother's Day becomes a sad reminder and an accolade for her supreme contribution to patriotism. Or maybe it's a time to be angry and resentful — why my son or daughter? Pride crumples in a darkened room filled with pictures of a young man or woman whose potential bled out onto a foreign soil.
This imagined scenario is a relentless assault on memories of all the boo-boos she kissed and Superman Band-Aids plastered on scraped knees and dinged elbows. If only Mama could have been there to fix things, to make them better, to chase the monster away, to kiss away hurts one more time, then, maybe she, too, can stop crying.
Questions and accusations stifle remorse, but tears, like water, ever the enemy of rock, wear down resistance. Solace wrestles with acceptance, but grief takes on a presence of its own. Guided by ghosts, it is either torment or release from them.
When burying a child, remembrance is love and guilt is debilitating; however, my quantifying and simplifying a mother's loss and angst seems as unsentimental as some pot-bellied politician pontificating on Memorial Day.
How can anyone suppose a wound so deep that it bleeds concurrently with every thought of the initial one? Such trauma is personal, so much so, empathy even seems contrived.
In the middle of the night, this woman still awakens to the imagined cries of her baby, only to clutch a pillow instead. Holidays are a poignant reminder of her diminished family; her unwitting contribution to a distant conflict that ignored every mother's boundaries and snatched innocence as abruptly as the life she mourns. Her naiveté is six-feet under as well. The flag so gloriously waving in front of her home casts a shadow.
This Mother's Day, there are women embracing memories rather than their children. These mothers fully understand the costs of war and wonder if the old generals and politicians who enact them ever walk in a military cemetery and sob aloud? Do their sons and daughters wear our country's uniform and see active duty?
Do beribboned chests ever exhale and tremble at the sight of an old woman kneeling at Arlington? Her fingers lovingly touching a carved name as if it were warm and whispering back to her.
Maybe it is; maybe that's why her face is pressed against the stone so she can once again hear, "Mama, Mama."
- A Gold Star Mom from New Braunfels, Texas
Aaron and his mother, Tina - 1997
Tina's trust and faith made this tribute site possible
Honor isn't about making the right choices. It's about dealing with the consequences...
Another world, some other time
You lay your sanity on the line
Familiar faces, familiar sights
Reach back, remember with all your might...
And then you sense a change
Nothing feels the same
All your dreams are strange
Love comes walking in...
- Van Halen, 1986
Lindsey and Aaron
And you thought Jean-Claude Van Damme looked cool in "Universal Soldier"...
Aaron enlisted in the Army several months shy of his 18th birthday. He was shipped off to Iraq with the Washington-based 2nd Infantry Division.
At 19 years old, he had learned what many of us do not learn in an entire lifetime: How to live honorably and with courage...
The Patriot Guard Riders at Aaron's funeral - May, 2007
"These kids join to fight for The United States of America and all the patriotic terms... But they die for their friends next to them..." - John Phelps, Gold-Star father
The memorial in Iraq for Aaron and Pfc. Jonathan V. Hamm, who died the same day, also in Bahgdad
Aaron loved roller-coasters and the New York Yankees...
"Aaron was assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment, 4th Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, Fort Lewis, WA - But his true home was in Hampton Roads..." - Aaron's Gold Star mom, Tina
The term "Hampton Roads" is a centuries-old designation that originated when the region was a struggling English outpost nearly four hundred years ago. The name is believed to have originated from the combination of two separate words.
The word "Hampton" honors one of the founders of the Virginia Company of London and a great supporter of the colonization of Virginia, Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton. In the easternmost part of the new colony, downstream from Jamestown, the early administrative center was known as Elizabeth Cittie [sic], named for Princess Elizabeth, the daughter of King James I, and formally designated by the Virginia Company in 1619. (The Elizabeth River was also named for the princess).
The town at the center of Elizabeth Cittie became known as simply "Hampton", and a nearby waterway was designated Hampton Creek (also known as Hampton River). The town (and later city) of Hampton was the county seat of Elizabeth City County for over 300 years, until they were politically consolidated into the current large independent city known as Hampton, Virginia in 1952. The City of Hampton thus became one of the large Seven Cities of Hampton Roads, of which four others also grew to the larger sizes by consolidating with neighboring jurisdictions such as counties and towns in the mid-twentieth century...
The love that once was born can not die. For it has become part of us, of our life.
Woven into the very texture of our being...
Aaron - 6 months old
Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal...
The Honor and Remember flag pole, part of the Aaron Gautier Memorial currently being constructed at Aaron's family's home. Check back with us as more pictures are posted...
If 50 years from now you are a million miles away, and need the light of a special one to brighten up your day....
Just close your eyes and feel your heart and honestly believe... There's a piece of me inside your heart, and that piece will never leave...
- Anonymous
Aaron and his sister, Alexis
A baby boy is a blank check made payable to the human race...
- Barbara Christine Seifert
All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination, Imagination is the workshop of your mind, capable of turning mind energy into accomplishment and wealth...
Aaron and SSG Coady (his Drill Sergeant) on graduation day - Fort Benning, GA
Some choices we live not only once but a thousand times over, remembering them for the rest of our lives....
Transcript from the Nancy Grace show - 6/23/09
"Youth is, after all, just a moment, but it is the moment, the spark, that you always carry in your heart..."
- Raisa M. Gorbachev
Aaron in 1997
"It takes a long time to become young..."
- Pablo Picasso
Aaron on his 36 hour weekend pass during Basic Training - Fort Benning, GA
The Purple Heart is a United States military decoration awarded in the name of the President to those who have been wounded or killed while serving on or after April 5, 1917 with the U.S. military. The National Purple Heart Hall of Honor is located in New Windsor, New York.
The original idea for the Purple Heart (the Badge of Military Merit) is the oldest symbol and award that is still given to members of the U.S. military, surpassed in history only by the long obsolete Fidelity Medallion.
"Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee... calls back the lovely April of her prime..."
- William Shakespeare
"When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her children..."
- Sophia Loren
"In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed forever..."
- I Corinthians 15:52
What the eye does not admire the heart does not desire...
"Mama, Mama" is a universal cry of the dying in battle. Men maimed and broken scream for their mothers, who mercifully can't hear them. Posthumous medals for valor muffle the child and honor the warrior, but for a Gold Star Mother, ribbons and ceremony are as short-lived as the cherished remains being buried.
Without being a statistic, she, too, is a casualty of war. Heard in her strangled weeping are guttural pleas to God to ease the pain of losing a child. For this heartbroken woman, a coffin, even one draped in the American flag and carried by white-gloved Marines, is the grim totality of her forced enlistment into a war that breeched the refuge of home.
The bomb in this woman's living room is the conspicuous absence of her baby. Yes, baby, because no matter how old or how long deceased, the person for whom Taps are played only sleeps in his mother's heart. Naptime is eternity.
Mother's Day becomes a sad reminder and an accolade for her supreme contribution to patriotism. Or maybe it's a time to be angry and resentful — why my son or daughter? Pride crumples in a darkened room filled with pictures of a young man or woman whose potential bled out onto a foreign soil.
This imagined scenario is a relentless assault on memories of all the boo-boos she kissed and Superman Band-Aids plastered on scraped knees and dinged elbows. If only Mama could have been there to fix things, to make them better, to chase the monster away, to kiss away hurts one more time, then, maybe she, too, can stop crying.
Questions and accusations stifle remorse, but tears, like water, ever the enemy of rock, wear down resistance. Solace wrestles with acceptance, but grief takes on a presence of its own. Guided by ghosts, it is either torment or release from them.
When burying a child, remembrance is love and guilt is debilitating; however, my quantifying and simplifying a mother's loss and angst seems as unsentimental as some pot-bellied politician pontificating on Memorial Day.
How can anyone suppose a wound so deep that it bleeds concurrently with every thought of the initial one? Such trauma is personal, so much so, empathy even seems contrived.
In the middle of the night, this woman still awakens to the imagined cries of her baby, only to clutch a pillow instead. Holidays are a poignant reminder of her diminished family; her unwitting contribution to a distant conflict that ignored every mother's boundaries and snatched innocence as abruptly as the life she mourns. Her naiveté is six-feet under as well. The flag so gloriously waving in front of her home casts a shadow.
This Mother's Day, there are women embracing memories rather than their children. These mothers fully understand the costs of war and wonder if the old generals and politicians who enact them ever walk in a military cemetery and sob aloud? Do their sons and daughters wear our country's uniform and see active duty?
Do beribboned chests ever exhale and tremble at the sight of an old woman kneeling at Arlington? Her fingers lovingly touching a carved name as if it were warm and whispering back to her.
Maybe it is; maybe that's why her face is pressed against the stone so she can once again hear, "Mama, Mama."
- A Gold Star Mom from New Braunfels, Texas
Aaron and his mother, Tina - 1997
Tina's trust and faith made this tribute site possible
Honor isn't about making the right choices. It's about dealing with the consequences...
Another world, some other time
You lay your sanity on the line
Familiar faces, familiar sights
Reach back, remember with all your might...
And then you sense a change
Nothing feels the same
All your dreams are strange
Love comes walking in...
- Van Halen, 1986
Lindsey and Aaron
Aaron enlisted in the Army several months shy of his 18th birthday. He was shipped off to Iraq with the Washington-based 2nd Infantry Division.
At 19 years old, he had learned what many of us do not learn in an entire lifetime: How to live honorably and with courage...
The Patriot Guard Riders at Aaron's funeral - May, 2007
"These kids join to fight for The United States of America and all the patriotic terms... But they die for their friends next to them..." - John Phelps, Gold-Star father
The memorial in Iraq for Aaron and Pfc. Jonathan V. Hamm, who died the same day, also in Bahgdad
Aaron loved roller-coasters and the New York Yankees...
"Aaron was assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment, 4th Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, Fort Lewis, WA - But his true home was in Hampton Roads..." - Aaron's Gold Star mom, Tina
The term "Hampton Roads" is a centuries-old designation that originated when the region was a struggling English outpost nearly four hundred years ago. The name is believed to have originated from the combination of two separate words.
The word "Hampton" honors one of the founders of the Virginia Company of London and a great supporter of the colonization of Virginia, Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton. In the easternmost part of the new colony, downstream from Jamestown, the early administrative center was known as Elizabeth Cittie [sic], named for Princess Elizabeth, the daughter of King James I, and formally designated by the Virginia Company in 1619. (The Elizabeth River was also named for the princess).
The town at the center of Elizabeth Cittie became known as simply "Hampton", and a nearby waterway was designated Hampton Creek (also known as Hampton River). The town (and later city) of Hampton was the county seat of Elizabeth City County for over 300 years, until they were politically consolidated into the current large independent city known as Hampton, Virginia in 1952. The City of Hampton thus became one of the large Seven Cities of Hampton Roads, of which four others also grew to the larger sizes by consolidating with neighboring jurisdictions such as counties and towns in the mid-twentieth century...
The love that once was born can not die. For it has become part of us, of our life.
Woven into the very texture of our being...
Aaron - 6 months old
Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal...
The Honor and Remember flag pole, part of the Aaron Gautier Memorial currently being constructed at Aaron's family's home. Check back with us as more pictures are posted...
If 50 years from now you are a million miles away, and need the light of a special one to brighten up your day....
Just close your eyes and feel your heart and honestly believe... There's a piece of me inside your heart, and that piece will never leave...
- Anonymous
Aaron and his sister, Alexis
A baby boy is a blank check made payable to the human race...
- Barbara Christine Seifert
All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination, Imagination is the workshop of your mind, capable of turning mind energy into accomplishment and wealth...
Aaron and SSG Coady (his Drill Sergeant) on graduation day - Fort Benning, GA
Some choices we live not only once but a thousand times over, remembering them for the rest of our lives....
Transcript from the Nancy Grace show - 6/23/09
"Youth is, after all, just a moment, but it is the moment, the spark, that you always carry in your heart..."
- Raisa M. Gorbachev
Aaron in 1997
"It takes a long time to become young..."
- Pablo Picasso
Aaron on his 36 hour weekend pass during Basic Training - Fort Benning, GA
The Purple Heart is a United States military decoration awarded in the name of the President to those who have been wounded or killed while serving on or after April 5, 1917 with the U.S. military. The National Purple Heart Hall of Honor is located in New Windsor, New York.
The original idea for the Purple Heart (the Badge of Military Merit) is the oldest symbol and award that is still given to members of the U.S. military, surpassed in history only by the long obsolete Fidelity Medallion.
"Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee... calls back the lovely April of her prime..."
- William Shakespeare
"When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her children..."
- Sophia Loren
"In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed forever..."
- I Corinthians 15:52
What the eye does not admire the heart does not desire...
"Mama, Mama" is a universal cry of the dying in battle. Men maimed and broken scream for their mothers, who mercifully can't hear them. Posthumous medals for valor muffle the child and honor the warrior, but for a Gold Star Mother, ribbons and ceremony are as short-lived as the cherished remains being buried.
Without being a statistic, she, too, is a casualty of war. Heard in her strangled weeping are guttural pleas to God to ease the pain of losing a child. For this heartbroken woman, a coffin, even one draped in the American flag and carried by white-gloved Marines, is the grim totality of her forced enlistment into a war that breeched the refuge of home.
The bomb in this woman's living room is the conspicuous absence of her baby. Yes, baby, because no matter how old or how long deceased, the person for whom Taps are played only sleeps in his mother's heart. Naptime is eternity.
Mother's Day becomes a sad reminder and an accolade for her supreme contribution to patriotism. Or maybe it's a time to be angry and resentful — why my son or daughter? Pride crumples in a darkened room filled with pictures of a young man or woman whose potential bled out onto a foreign soil.
This imagined scenario is a relentless assault on memories of all the boo-boos she kissed and Superman Band-Aids plastered on scraped knees and dinged elbows. If only Mama could have been there to fix things, to make them better, to chase the monster away, to kiss away hurts one more time, then, maybe she, too, can stop crying.
Questions and accusations stifle remorse, but tears, like water, ever the enemy of rock, wear down resistance. Solace wrestles with acceptance, but grief takes on a presence of its own. Guided by ghosts, it is either torment or release from them.
When burying a child, remembrance is love and guilt is debilitating; however, my quantifying and simplifying a mother's loss and angst seems as unsentimental as some pot-bellied politician pontificating on Memorial Day.
How can anyone suppose a wound so deep that it bleeds concurrently with every thought of the initial one? Such trauma is personal, so much so, empathy even seems contrived.
In the middle of the night, this woman still awakens to the imagined cries of her baby, only to clutch a pillow instead. Holidays are a poignant reminder of her diminished family; her unwitting contribution to a distant conflict that ignored every mother's boundaries and snatched innocence as abruptly as the life she mourns. Her naiveté is six-feet under as well. The flag so gloriously waving in front of her home casts a shadow.
This Mother's Day, there are women embracing memories rather than their children. These mothers fully understand the costs of war and wonder if the old generals and politicians who enact them ever walk in a military cemetery and sob aloud? Do their sons and daughters wear our country's uniform and see active duty?
Do beribboned chests ever exhale and tremble at the sight of an old woman kneeling at Arlington? Her fingers lovingly touching a carved name as if it were warm and whispering back to her.
Maybe it is; maybe that's why her face is pressed against the stone so she can once again hear, "Mama, Mama."
- A Gold Star Mom from New Braunfels, Texas
Aaron and his mother, Tina - 1997
Tina's trust and faith made this tribute site possible
Honor isn't about making the right choices. It's about dealing with the consequences...
Another world, some other time
You lay your sanity on the line
Familiar faces, familiar sights
Reach back, remember with all your might...
And then you sense a change
Nothing feels the same
All your dreams are strange
Love comes walking in...
- Van Halen, 1986
Lindsey and Aaron
Aaron enlisted in the Army several months shy of his 18th birthday. He was shipped off to Iraq with the Washington-based 2nd Infantry Division.
At 19 years old, he had learned what many of us do not learn in an entire lifetime: How to live honorably and with courage...
The Patriot Guard Riders at Aaron's funeral - May, 2007
"These kids join to fight for The United States of America and all the patriotic terms... But they die for their friends next to them..." - John Phelps, Gold-Star father
The memorial in Iraq for Aaron and Pfc. Jonathan V. Hamm, who died the same day, also in Bahgdad
Aaron loved roller-coasters and the New York Yankees...
"Aaron was assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment, 4th Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, Fort Lewis, WA - But his true home was in Hampton Roads..." - Aaron's Gold Star mom, Tina
The term "Hampton Roads" is a centuries-old designation that originated when the region was a struggling English outpost nearly four hundred years ago. The name is believed to have originated from the combination of two separate words.
The word "Hampton" honors one of the founders of the Virginia Company of London and a great supporter of the colonization of Virginia, Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton. In the easternmost part of the new colony, downstream from Jamestown, the early administrative center was known as Elizabeth Cittie [sic], named for Princess Elizabeth, the daughter of King James I, and formally designated by the Virginia Company in 1619. (The Elizabeth River was also named for the princess).
The town at the center of Elizabeth Cittie became known as simply "Hampton", and a nearby waterway was designated Hampton Creek (also known as Hampton River). The town (and later city) of Hampton was the county seat of Elizabeth City County for over 300 years, until they were politically consolidated into the current large independent city known as Hampton, Virginia in 1952. The City of Hampton thus became one of the large Seven Cities of Hampton Roads, of which four others also grew to the larger sizes by consolidating with neighboring jurisdictions such as counties and towns in the mid-twentieth century...
The love that once was born can not die. For it has become part of us, of our life.
Woven into the very texture of our being...
Aaron - 6 months old
Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal...
The Honor and Remember flag pole, part of the Aaron Gautier Memorial currently being constructed at Aaron's family's home. Check back with us as more pictures are posted...
If 50 years from now you are a million miles away, and need the light of a special one to brighten up your day....
Just close your eyes and feel your heart and honestly believe... There's a piece of me inside your heart, and that piece will never leave...
- Anonymous
Aaron and his sister, Alexis
A baby boy is a blank check made payable to the human race...
- Barbara Christine Seifert
All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination, Imagination is the workshop of your mind, capable of turning mind energy into accomplishment and wealth...
Aaron and SSG Coady (his Drill Sergeant) on graduation day - Fort Benning, GA
Some choices we live not only once but a thousand times over, remembering them for the rest of our lives....
Transcript from the Nancy Grace show - 6/23/09
"Youth is, after all, just a moment, but it is the moment, the spark, that you always carry in your heart..."
- Raisa M. Gorbachev
Aaron in 1997
"It takes a long time to become young..."
- Pablo Picasso
Aaron on his 36 hour weekend pass during Basic Training - Fort Benning, GA
The Purple Heart is a United States military decoration awarded in the name of the President to those who have been wounded or killed while serving on or after April 5, 1917 with the U.S. military. The National Purple Heart Hall of Honor is located in New Windsor, New York.
The original idea for the Purple Heart (the Badge of Military Merit) is the oldest symbol and award that is still given to members of the U.S. military, surpassed in history only by the long obsolete Fidelity Medallion.
"Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee... calls back the lovely April of her prime..."
- William Shakespeare
"When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her children..."
- Sophia Loren
"In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed forever..."
- I Corinthians 15:52
What the eye does not admire the heart does not desire...
"Mama, Mama" is a universal cry of the dying in battle. Men maimed and broken scream for their mothers, who mercifully can't hear them. Posthumous medals for valor muffle the child and honor the warrior, but for a Gold Star Mother, ribbons and ceremony are as short-lived as the cherished remains being buried.
Without being a statistic, she, too, is a casualty of war. Heard in her strangled weeping are guttural pleas to God to ease the pain of losing a child. For this heartbroken woman, a coffin, even one draped in the American flag and carried by white-gloved Marines, is the grim totality of her forced enlistment into a war that breeched the refuge of home.
The bomb in this woman's living room is the conspicuous absence of her baby. Yes, baby, because no matter how old or how long deceased, the person for whom Taps are played only sleeps in his mother's heart. Naptime is eternity.
Mother's Day becomes a sad reminder and an accolade for her supreme contribution to patriotism. Or maybe it's a time to be angry and resentful — why my son or daughter? Pride crumples in a darkened room filled with pictures of a young man or woman whose potential bled out onto a foreign soil.
This imagined scenario is a relentless assault on memories of all the boo-boos she kissed and Superman Band-Aids plastered on scraped knees and dinged elbows. If only Mama could have been there to fix things, to make them better, to chase the monster away, to kiss away hurts one more time, then, maybe she, too, can stop crying.
Questions and accusations stifle remorse, but tears, like water, ever the enemy of rock, wear down resistance. Solace wrestles with acceptance, but grief takes on a presence of its own. Guided by ghosts, it is either torment or release from them.
When burying a child, remembrance is love and guilt is debilitating; however, my quantifying and simplifying a mother's loss and angst seems as unsentimental as some pot-bellied politician pontificating on Memorial Day.
How can anyone suppose a wound so deep that it bleeds concurrently with every thought of the initial one? Such trauma is personal, so much so, empathy even seems contrived.
In the middle of the night, this woman still awakens to the imagined cries of her baby, only to clutch a pillow instead. Holidays are a poignant reminder of her diminished family; her unwitting contribution to a distant conflict that ignored every mother's boundaries and snatched innocence as abruptly as the life she mourns. Her naiveté is six-feet under as well. The flag so gloriously waving in front of her home casts a shadow.
This Mother's Day, there are women embracing memories rather than their children. These mothers fully understand the costs of war and wonder if the old generals and politicians who enact them ever walk in a military cemetery and sob aloud? Do their sons and daughters wear our country's uniform and see active duty?
Do beribboned chests ever exhale and tremble at the sight of an old woman kneeling at Arlington? Her fingers lovingly touching a carved name as if it were warm and whispering back to her.
Maybe it is; maybe that's why her face is pressed against the stone so she can once again hear, "Mama, Mama."
- A Gold Star Mom from New Braunfels, Texas
Aaron and his mother, Tina - 1997
Tina's trust and faith made this tribute site possible
Honor isn't about making the right choices. It's about dealing with the consequences...
Another world, some other time
You lay your sanity on the line
Familiar faces, familiar sights
Reach back, remember with all your might...
And then you sense a change
Nothing feels the same
All your dreams are strange
Love comes walking in...
- Van Halen, 1986
Lindsey and Aaron
"These kids join to fight for The United States of America and all the patriotic terms... But they die for their friends next to them..." - John Phelps, Gold-Star father
The memorial in Iraq for Aaron and Pfc. Jonathan V. Hamm, who died the same day, also in Bahgdad
Aaron loved roller-coasters and the New York Yankees...
"Aaron was assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment, 4th Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, Fort Lewis, WA - But his true home was in Hampton Roads..." - Aaron's Gold Star mom, Tina
The term "Hampton Roads" is a centuries-old designation that originated when the region was a struggling English outpost nearly four hundred years ago. The name is believed to have originated from the combination of two separate words.
The word "Hampton" honors one of the founders of the Virginia Company of London and a great supporter of the colonization of Virginia, Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton. In the easternmost part of the new colony, downstream from Jamestown, the early administrative center was known as Elizabeth Cittie [sic], named for Princess Elizabeth, the daughter of King James I, and formally designated by the Virginia Company in 1619. (The Elizabeth River was also named for the princess).
The town at the center of Elizabeth Cittie became known as simply "Hampton", and a nearby waterway was designated Hampton Creek (also known as Hampton River). The town (and later city) of Hampton was the county seat of Elizabeth City County for over 300 years, until they were politically consolidated into the current large independent city known as Hampton, Virginia in 1952. The City of Hampton thus became one of the large Seven Cities of Hampton Roads, of which four others also grew to the larger sizes by consolidating with neighboring jurisdictions such as counties and towns in the mid-twentieth century...
The love that once was born can not die. For it has become part of us, of our life.
Woven into the very texture of our being...
Aaron - 6 months old
Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal...
The Honor and Remember flag pole, part of the Aaron Gautier Memorial currently being constructed at Aaron's family's home. Check back with us as more pictures are posted...
If 50 years from now you are a million miles away, and need the light of a special one to brighten up your day....
Just close your eyes and feel your heart and honestly believe... There's a piece of me inside your heart, and that piece will never leave...
- Anonymous
Aaron and his sister, Alexis
A baby boy is a blank check made payable to the human race...
- Barbara Christine Seifert
All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination, Imagination is the workshop of your mind, capable of turning mind energy into accomplishment and wealth...
Aaron and SSG Coady (his Drill Sergeant) on graduation day - Fort Benning, GA
Some choices we live not only once but a thousand times over, remembering them for the rest of our lives....
Transcript from the Nancy Grace show - 6/23/09
"Youth is, after all, just a moment, but it is the moment, the spark, that you always carry in your heart..."
- Raisa M. Gorbachev
Aaron in 1997
"It takes a long time to become young..."
- Pablo Picasso
Aaron on his 36 hour weekend pass during Basic Training - Fort Benning, GA
The Purple Heart is a United States military decoration awarded in the name of the President to those who have been wounded or killed while serving on or after April 5, 1917 with the U.S. military. The National Purple Heart Hall of Honor is located in New Windsor, New York.
The original idea for the Purple Heart (the Badge of Military Merit) is the oldest symbol and award that is still given to members of the U.S. military, surpassed in history only by the long obsolete Fidelity Medallion.
"Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee... calls back the lovely April of her prime..."
- William Shakespeare
"When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her children..."
- Sophia Loren
"In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed forever..."
- I Corinthians 15:52
What the eye does not admire the heart does not desire...
"Mama, Mama" is a universal cry of the dying in battle. Men maimed and broken scream for their mothers, who mercifully can't hear them. Posthumous medals for valor muffle the child and honor the warrior, but for a Gold Star Mother, ribbons and ceremony are as short-lived as the cherished remains being buried.
Without being a statistic, she, too, is a casualty of war. Heard in her strangled weeping are guttural pleas to God to ease the pain of losing a child. For this heartbroken woman, a coffin, even one draped in the American flag and carried by white-gloved Marines, is the grim totality of her forced enlistment into a war that breeched the refuge of home.
The bomb in this woman's living room is the conspicuous absence of her baby. Yes, baby, because no matter how old or how long deceased, the person for whom Taps are played only sleeps in his mother's heart. Naptime is eternity.
Mother's Day becomes a sad reminder and an accolade for her supreme contribution to patriotism. Or maybe it's a time to be angry and resentful — why my son or daughter? Pride crumples in a darkened room filled with pictures of a young man or woman whose potential bled out onto a foreign soil.
This imagined scenario is a relentless assault on memories of all the boo-boos she kissed and Superman Band-Aids plastered on scraped knees and dinged elbows. If only Mama could have been there to fix things, to make them better, to chase the monster away, to kiss away hurts one more time, then, maybe she, too, can stop crying.
Questions and accusations stifle remorse, but tears, like water, ever the enemy of rock, wear down resistance. Solace wrestles with acceptance, but grief takes on a presence of its own. Guided by ghosts, it is either torment or release from them.
When burying a child, remembrance is love and guilt is debilitating; however, my quantifying and simplifying a mother's loss and angst seems as unsentimental as some pot-bellied politician pontificating on Memorial Day.
How can anyone suppose a wound so deep that it bleeds concurrently with every thought of the initial one? Such trauma is personal, so much so, empathy even seems contrived.
In the middle of the night, this woman still awakens to the imagined cries of her baby, only to clutch a pillow instead. Holidays are a poignant reminder of her diminished family; her unwitting contribution to a distant conflict that ignored every mother's boundaries and snatched innocence as abruptly as the life she mourns. Her naiveté is six-feet under as well. The flag so gloriously waving in front of her home casts a shadow.
This Mother's Day, there are women embracing memories rather than their children. These mothers fully understand the costs of war and wonder if the old generals and politicians who enact them ever walk in a military cemetery and sob aloud? Do their sons and daughters wear our country's uniform and see active duty?
Do beribboned chests ever exhale and tremble at the sight of an old woman kneeling at Arlington? Her fingers lovingly touching a carved name as if it were warm and whispering back to her.
Maybe it is; maybe that's why her face is pressed against the stone so she can once again hear, "Mama, Mama."
- A Gold Star Mom from New Braunfels, Texas
Aaron and his mother, Tina - 1997
Tina's trust and faith made this tribute site possible
Honor isn't about making the right choices. It's about dealing with the consequences...
Another world, some other time
You lay your sanity on the line
Familiar faces, familiar sights
Reach back, remember with all your might...
And then you sense a change
Nothing feels the same
All your dreams are strange
Love comes walking in...
- Van Halen, 1986
Lindsey and Aaron
"These kids join to fight for The United States of America and all the patriotic terms... But they die for their friends next to them..." - John Phelps, Gold-Star father
The memorial in Iraq for Aaron and Pfc. Jonathan V. Hamm, who died the same day, also in Bahgdad
Aaron loved roller-coasters and the New York Yankees...
"Aaron was assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment, 4th Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, Fort Lewis, WA - But his true home was in Hampton Roads..." - Aaron's Gold Star mom, Tina
The term "Hampton Roads" is a centuries-old designation that originated when the region was a struggling English outpost nearly four hundred years ago. The name is believed to have originated from the combination of two separate words.
The word "Hampton" honors one of the founders of the Virginia Company of London and a great supporter of the colonization of Virginia, Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton. In the easternmost part of the new colony, downstream from Jamestown, the early administrative center was known as Elizabeth Cittie [sic], named for Princess Elizabeth, the daughter of King James I, and formally designated by the Virginia Company in 1619. (The Elizabeth River was also named for the princess).
The town at the center of Elizabeth Cittie became known as simply "Hampton", and a nearby waterway was designated Hampton Creek (also known as Hampton River). The town (and later city) of Hampton was the county seat of Elizabeth City County for over 300 years, until they were politically consolidated into the current large independent city known as Hampton, Virginia in 1952. The City of Hampton thus became one of the large Seven Cities of Hampton Roads, of which four others also grew to the larger sizes by consolidating with neighboring jurisdictions such as counties and towns in the mid-twentieth century...
The love that once was born can not die. For it has become part of us, of our life.
Woven into the very texture of our being...
Aaron - 6 months old
Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal...
The Honor and Remember flag pole, part of the Aaron Gautier Memorial currently being constructed at Aaron's family's home. Check back with us as more pictures are posted...
If 50 years from now you are a million miles away, and need the light of a special one to brighten up your day....
Just close your eyes and feel your heart and honestly believe... There's a piece of me inside your heart, and that piece will never leave...
- Anonymous
Aaron and his sister, Alexis
A baby boy is a blank check made payable to the human race...
- Barbara Christine Seifert
All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination, Imagination is the workshop of your mind, capable of turning mind energy into accomplishment and wealth...
Aaron and SSG Coady (his Drill Sergeant) on graduation day - Fort Benning, GA
Some choices we live not only once but a thousand times over, remembering them for the rest of our lives....
Transcript from the Nancy Grace show - 6/23/09
"Youth is, after all, just a moment, but it is the moment, the spark, that you always carry in your heart..."
- Raisa M. Gorbachev
Aaron in 1997
"It takes a long time to become young..."
- Pablo Picasso
Aaron on his 36 hour weekend pass during Basic Training - Fort Benning, GA
The Purple Heart is a United States military decoration awarded in the name of the President to those who have been wounded or killed while serving on or after April 5, 1917 with the U.S. military. The National Purple Heart Hall of Honor is located in New Windsor, New York.
The original idea for the Purple Heart (the Badge of Military Merit) is the oldest symbol and award that is still given to members of the U.S. military, surpassed in history only by the long obsolete Fidelity Medallion.
"Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee... calls back the lovely April of her prime..."
- William Shakespeare
"When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her children..."
- Sophia Loren
"In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed forever..."
- I Corinthians 15:52
What the eye does not admire the heart does not desire...
"Mama, Mama" is a universal cry of the dying in battle. Men maimed and broken scream for their mothers, who mercifully can't hear them. Posthumous medals for valor muffle the child and honor the warrior, but for a Gold Star Mother, ribbons and ceremony are as short-lived as the cherished remains being buried.
Without being a statistic, she, too, is a casualty of war. Heard in her strangled weeping are guttural pleas to God to ease the pain of losing a child. For this heartbroken woman, a coffin, even one draped in the American flag and carried by white-gloved Marines, is the grim totality of her forced enlistment into a war that breeched the refuge of home.
The bomb in this woman's living room is the conspicuous absence of her baby. Yes, baby, because no matter how old or how long deceased, the person for whom Taps are played only sleeps in his mother's heart. Naptime is eternity.
Mother's Day becomes a sad reminder and an accolade for her supreme contribution to patriotism. Or maybe it's a time to be angry and resentful — why my son or daughter? Pride crumples in a darkened room filled with pictures of a young man or woman whose potential bled out onto a foreign soil.
This imagined scenario is a relentless assault on memories of all the boo-boos she kissed and Superman Band-Aids plastered on scraped knees and dinged elbows. If only Mama could have been there to fix things, to make them better, to chase the monster away, to kiss away hurts one more time, then, maybe she, too, can stop crying.
Questions and accusations stifle remorse, but tears, like water, ever the enemy of rock, wear down resistance. Solace wrestles with acceptance, but grief takes on a presence of its own. Guided by ghosts, it is either torment or release from them.
When burying a child, remembrance is love and guilt is debilitating; however, my quantifying and simplifying a mother's loss and angst seems as unsentimental as some pot-bellied politician pontificating on Memorial Day.
How can anyone suppose a wound so deep that it bleeds concurrently with every thought of the initial one? Such trauma is personal, so much so, empathy even seems contrived.
In the middle of the night, this woman still awakens to the imagined cries of her baby, only to clutch a pillow instead. Holidays are a poignant reminder of her diminished family; her unwitting contribution to a distant conflict that ignored every mother's boundaries and snatched innocence as abruptly as the life she mourns. Her naiveté is six-feet under as well. The flag so gloriously waving in front of her home casts a shadow.
This Mother's Day, there are women embracing memories rather than their children. These mothers fully understand the costs of war and wonder if the old generals and politicians who enact them ever walk in a military cemetery and sob aloud? Do their sons and daughters wear our country's uniform and see active duty?
Do beribboned chests ever exhale and tremble at the sight of an old woman kneeling at Arlington? Her fingers lovingly touching a carved name as if it were warm and whispering back to her.
Maybe it is; maybe that's why her face is pressed against the stone so she can once again hear, "Mama, Mama."
- A Gold Star Mom from New Braunfels, Texas
Aaron and his mother, Tina - 1997
Tina's trust and faith made this tribute site possible
Honor isn't about making the right choices. It's about dealing with the consequences...
Another world, some other time
You lay your sanity on the line
Familiar faces, familiar sights
Reach back, remember with all your might...
And then you sense a change
Nothing feels the same
All your dreams are strange
Love comes walking in...
- Van Halen, 1986
Lindsey and Aaron
The memorial in Iraq for Aaron and Pfc. Jonathan V. Hamm, who died the same day, also in Bahgdad
Aaron loved roller-coasters and the New York Yankees...
"Aaron was assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment, 4th Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, Fort Lewis, WA - But his true home was in Hampton Roads..." - Aaron's Gold Star mom, Tina
The term "Hampton Roads" is a centuries-old designation that originated when the region was a struggling English outpost nearly four hundred years ago. The name is believed to have originated from the combination of two separate words.
The word "Hampton" honors one of the founders of the Virginia Company of London and a great supporter of the colonization of Virginia, Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton. In the easternmost part of the new colony, downstream from Jamestown, the early administrative center was known as Elizabeth Cittie [sic], named for Princess Elizabeth, the daughter of King James I, and formally designated by the Virginia Company in 1619. (The Elizabeth River was also named for the princess).
The town at the center of Elizabeth Cittie became known as simply "Hampton", and a nearby waterway was designated Hampton Creek (also known as Hampton River). The town (and later city) of Hampton was the county seat of Elizabeth City County for over 300 years, until they were politically consolidated into the current large independent city known as Hampton, Virginia in 1952. The City of Hampton thus became one of the large Seven Cities of Hampton Roads, of which four others also grew to the larger sizes by consolidating with neighboring jurisdictions such as counties and towns in the mid-twentieth century...
The love that once was born can not die. For it has become part of us, of our life.
Woven into the very texture of our being...
Aaron - 6 months old
Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal...
The Honor and Remember flag pole, part of the Aaron Gautier Memorial currently being constructed at Aaron's family's home. Check back with us as more pictures are posted...
If 50 years from now you are a million miles away, and need the light of a special one to brighten up your day....
Just close your eyes and feel your heart and honestly believe... There's a piece of me inside your heart, and that piece will never leave...
- Anonymous
Aaron and his sister, Alexis
A baby boy is a blank check made payable to the human race...
- Barbara Christine Seifert
All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination, Imagination is the workshop of your mind, capable of turning mind energy into accomplishment and wealth...
Aaron and SSG Coady (his Drill Sergeant) on graduation day - Fort Benning, GA
Some choices we live not only once but a thousand times over, remembering them for the rest of our lives....
Transcript from the Nancy Grace show - 6/23/09
"Youth is, after all, just a moment, but it is the moment, the spark, that you always carry in your heart..."
- Raisa M. Gorbachev
Aaron in 1997
"It takes a long time to become young..."
- Pablo Picasso
Aaron on his 36 hour weekend pass during Basic Training - Fort Benning, GA
The Purple Heart is a United States military decoration awarded in the name of the President to those who have been wounded or killed while serving on or after April 5, 1917 with the U.S. military. The National Purple Heart Hall of Honor is located in New Windsor, New York.
The original idea for the Purple Heart (the Badge of Military Merit) is the oldest symbol and award that is still given to members of the U.S. military, surpassed in history only by the long obsolete Fidelity Medallion.
"Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee... calls back the lovely April of her prime..."
- William Shakespeare
"When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her children..."
- Sophia Loren
"In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed forever..."
- I Corinthians 15:52
What the eye does not admire the heart does not desire...
"Mama, Mama" is a universal cry of the dying in battle. Men maimed and broken scream for their mothers, who mercifully can't hear them. Posthumous medals for valor muffle the child and honor the warrior, but for a Gold Star Mother, ribbons and ceremony are as short-lived as the cherished remains being buried.
Without being a statistic, she, too, is a casualty of war. Heard in her strangled weeping are guttural pleas to God to ease the pain of losing a child. For this heartbroken woman, a coffin, even one draped in the American flag and carried by white-gloved Marines, is the grim totality of her forced enlistment into a war that breeched the refuge of home.
The bomb in this woman's living room is the conspicuous absence of her baby. Yes, baby, because no matter how old or how long deceased, the person for whom Taps are played only sleeps in his mother's heart. Naptime is eternity.
Mother's Day becomes a sad reminder and an accolade for her supreme contribution to patriotism. Or maybe it's a time to be angry and resentful — why my son or daughter? Pride crumples in a darkened room filled with pictures of a young man or woman whose potential bled out onto a foreign soil.
This imagined scenario is a relentless assault on memories of all the boo-boos she kissed and Superman Band-Aids plastered on scraped knees and dinged elbows. If only Mama could have been there to fix things, to make them better, to chase the monster away, to kiss away hurts one more time, then, maybe she, too, can stop crying.
Questions and accusations stifle remorse, but tears, like water, ever the enemy of rock, wear down resistance. Solace wrestles with acceptance, but grief takes on a presence of its own. Guided by ghosts, it is either torment or release from them.
When burying a child, remembrance is love and guilt is debilitating; however, my quantifying and simplifying a mother's loss and angst seems as unsentimental as some pot-bellied politician pontificating on Memorial Day.
How can anyone suppose a wound so deep that it bleeds concurrently with every thought of the initial one? Such trauma is personal, so much so, empathy even seems contrived.
In the middle of the night, this woman still awakens to the imagined cries of her baby, only to clutch a pillow instead. Holidays are a poignant reminder of her diminished family; her unwitting contribution to a distant conflict that ignored every mother's boundaries and snatched innocence as abruptly as the life she mourns. Her naiveté is six-feet under as well. The flag so gloriously waving in front of her home casts a shadow.
This Mother's Day, there are women embracing memories rather than their children. These mothers fully understand the costs of war and wonder if the old generals and politicians who enact them ever walk in a military cemetery and sob aloud? Do their sons and daughters wear our country's uniform and see active duty?
Do beribboned chests ever exhale and tremble at the sight of an old woman kneeling at Arlington? Her fingers lovingly touching a carved name as if it were warm and whispering back to her.
Maybe it is; maybe that's why her face is pressed against the stone so she can once again hear, "Mama, Mama."
- A Gold Star Mom from New Braunfels, Texas
Aaron and his mother, Tina - 1997
Tina's trust and faith made this tribute site possible
Honor isn't about making the right choices. It's about dealing with the consequences...
Another world, some other time
You lay your sanity on the line
Familiar faces, familiar sights
Reach back, remember with all your might...
And then you sense a change
Nothing feels the same
All your dreams are strange
Love comes walking in...
- Van Halen, 1986
Lindsey and Aaron
Aaron loved roller-coasters and the New York Yankees...
"Aaron was assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment, 4th Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, Fort Lewis, WA - But his true home was in Hampton Roads..." - Aaron's Gold Star mom, Tina
The term "Hampton Roads" is a centuries-old designation that originated when the region was a struggling English outpost nearly four hundred years ago. The name is believed to have originated from the combination of two separate words.
The word "Hampton" honors one of the founders of the Virginia Company of London and a great supporter of the colonization of Virginia, Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton. In the easternmost part of the new colony, downstream from Jamestown, the early administrative center was known as Elizabeth Cittie [sic], named for Princess Elizabeth, the daughter of King James I, and formally designated by the Virginia Company in 1619. (The Elizabeth River was also named for the princess).
The town at the center of Elizabeth Cittie became known as simply "Hampton", and a nearby waterway was designated Hampton Creek (also known as Hampton River). The town (and later city) of Hampton was the county seat of Elizabeth City County for over 300 years, until they were politically consolidated into the current large independent city known as Hampton, Virginia in 1952. The City of Hampton thus became one of the large Seven Cities of Hampton Roads, of which four others also grew to the larger sizes by consolidating with neighboring jurisdictions such as counties and towns in the mid-twentieth century...
The love that once was born can not die. For it has become part of us, of our life.
Woven into the very texture of our being...
Aaron - 6 months old
Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal...
The Honor and Remember flag pole, part of the Aaron Gautier Memorial currently being constructed at Aaron's family's home. Check back with us as more pictures are posted...
If 50 years from now you are a million miles away, and need the light of a special one to brighten up your day....
Just close your eyes and feel your heart and honestly believe... There's a piece of me inside your heart, and that piece will never leave...
- Anonymous
Aaron and his sister, Alexis
A baby boy is a blank check made payable to the human race...
- Barbara Christine Seifert
All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination, Imagination is the workshop of your mind, capable of turning mind energy into accomplishment and wealth...
Aaron and SSG Coady (his Drill Sergeant) on graduation day - Fort Benning, GA
Some choices we live not only once but a thousand times over, remembering them for the rest of our lives....
Transcript from the Nancy Grace show - 6/23/09
"Youth is, after all, just a moment, but it is the moment, the spark, that you always carry in your heart..."
- Raisa M. Gorbachev
Aaron in 1997
"It takes a long time to become young..."
- Pablo Picasso
Aaron on his 36 hour weekend pass during Basic Training - Fort Benning, GA
The Purple Heart is a United States military decoration awarded in the name of the President to those who have been wounded or killed while serving on or after April 5, 1917 with the U.S. military. The National Purple Heart Hall of Honor is located in New Windsor, New York.
The original idea for the Purple Heart (the Badge of Military Merit) is the oldest symbol and award that is still given to members of the U.S. military, surpassed in history only by the long obsolete Fidelity Medallion.
"Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee... calls back the lovely April of her prime..."
- William Shakespeare
"When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her children..."
- Sophia Loren
"In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed forever..."
- I Corinthians 15:52
What the eye does not admire the heart does not desire...
"Mama, Mama" is a universal cry of the dying in battle. Men maimed and broken scream for their mothers, who mercifully can't hear them. Posthumous medals for valor muffle the child and honor the warrior, but for a Gold Star Mother, ribbons and ceremony are as short-lived as the cherished remains being buried.
Without being a statistic, she, too, is a casualty of war. Heard in her strangled weeping are guttural pleas to God to ease the pain of losing a child. For this heartbroken woman, a coffin, even one draped in the American flag and carried by white-gloved Marines, is the grim totality of her forced enlistment into a war that breeched the refuge of home.
The bomb in this woman's living room is the conspicuous absence of her baby. Yes, baby, because no matter how old or how long deceased, the person for whom Taps are played only sleeps in his mother's heart. Naptime is eternity.
Mother's Day becomes a sad reminder and an accolade for her supreme contribution to patriotism. Or maybe it's a time to be angry and resentful — why my son or daughter? Pride crumples in a darkened room filled with pictures of a young man or woman whose potential bled out onto a foreign soil.
This imagined scenario is a relentless assault on memories of all the boo-boos she kissed and Superman Band-Aids plastered on scraped knees and dinged elbows. If only Mama could have been there to fix things, to make them better, to chase the monster away, to kiss away hurts one more time, then, maybe she, too, can stop crying.
Questions and accusations stifle remorse, but tears, like water, ever the enemy of rock, wear down resistance. Solace wrestles with acceptance, but grief takes on a presence of its own. Guided by ghosts, it is either torment or release from them.
When burying a child, remembrance is love and guilt is debilitating; however, my quantifying and simplifying a mother's loss and angst seems as unsentimental as some pot-bellied politician pontificating on Memorial Day.
How can anyone suppose a wound so deep that it bleeds concurrently with every thought of the initial one? Such trauma is personal, so much so, empathy even seems contrived.
In the middle of the night, this woman still awakens to the imagined cries of her baby, only to clutch a pillow instead. Holidays are a poignant reminder of her diminished family; her unwitting contribution to a distant conflict that ignored every mother's boundaries and snatched innocence as abruptly as the life she mourns. Her naiveté is six-feet under as well. The flag so gloriously waving in front of her home casts a shadow.
This Mother's Day, there are women embracing memories rather than their children. These mothers fully understand the costs of war and wonder if the old generals and politicians who enact them ever walk in a military cemetery and sob aloud? Do their sons and daughters wear our country's uniform and see active duty?
Do beribboned chests ever exhale and tremble at the sight of an old woman kneeling at Arlington? Her fingers lovingly touching a carved name as if it were warm and whispering back to her.
Maybe it is; maybe that's why her face is pressed against the stone so she can once again hear, "Mama, Mama."
- A Gold Star Mom from New Braunfels, Texas
Aaron and his mother, Tina - 1997
Tina's trust and faith made this tribute site possible
Honor isn't about making the right choices. It's about dealing with the consequences...
Another world, some other time
You lay your sanity on the line
Familiar faces, familiar sights
Reach back, remember with all your might...
And then you sense a change
Nothing feels the same
All your dreams are strange
Love comes walking in...
- Van Halen, 1986
Lindsey and Aaron
Aaron loved roller-coasters and the New York Yankees...
"Aaron was assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment, 4th Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, Fort Lewis, WA - But his true home was in Hampton Roads..." - Aaron's Gold Star mom, Tina
The term "Hampton Roads" is a centuries-old designation that originated when the region was a struggling English outpost nearly four hundred years ago. The name is believed to have originated from the combination of two separate words.
The word "Hampton" honors one of the founders of the Virginia Company of London and a great supporter of the colonization of Virginia, Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton. In the easternmost part of the new colony, downstream from Jamestown, the early administrative center was known as Elizabeth Cittie [sic], named for Princess Elizabeth, the daughter of King James I, and formally designated by the Virginia Company in 1619. (The Elizabeth River was also named for the princess).
The town at the center of Elizabeth Cittie became known as simply "Hampton", and a nearby waterway was designated Hampton Creek (also known as Hampton River). The town (and later city) of Hampton was the county seat of Elizabeth City County for over 300 years, until they were politically consolidated into the current large independent city known as Hampton, Virginia in 1952. The City of Hampton thus became one of the large Seven Cities of Hampton Roads, of which four others also grew to the larger sizes by consolidating with neighboring jurisdictions such as counties and towns in the mid-twentieth century...
The love that once was born can not die. For it has become part of us, of our life.
Woven into the very texture of our being...
Aaron - 6 months old
Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal...
The Honor and Remember flag pole, part of the Aaron Gautier Memorial currently being constructed at Aaron's family's home. Check back with us as more pictures are posted...
If 50 years from now you are a million miles away, and need the light of a special one to brighten up your day....
Just close your eyes and feel your heart and honestly believe... There's a piece of me inside your heart, and that piece will never leave...
- Anonymous
Aaron and his sister, Alexis
A baby boy is a blank check made payable to the human race...
- Barbara Christine Seifert
All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination, Imagination is the workshop of your mind, capable of turning mind energy into accomplishment and wealth...
Aaron and SSG Coady (his Drill Sergeant) on graduation day - Fort Benning, GA
Some choices we live not only once but a thousand times over, remembering them for the rest of our lives....
Transcript from the Nancy Grace show - 6/23/09
"Youth is, after all, just a moment, but it is the moment, the spark, that you always carry in your heart..."
- Raisa M. Gorbachev
Aaron in 1997
"It takes a long time to become young..."
- Pablo Picasso
Aaron on his 36 hour weekend pass during Basic Training - Fort Benning, GA
The Purple Heart is a United States military decoration awarded in the name of the President to those who have been wounded or killed while serving on or after April 5, 1917 with the U.S. military. The National Purple Heart Hall of Honor is located in New Windsor, New York.
The original idea for the Purple Heart (the Badge of Military Merit) is the oldest symbol and award that is still given to members of the U.S. military, surpassed in history only by the long obsolete Fidelity Medallion.
"Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee... calls back the lovely April of her prime..."
- William Shakespeare
"When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her children..."
- Sophia Loren
"In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed forever..."
- I Corinthians 15:52
What the eye does not admire the heart does not desire...
"Mama, Mama" is a universal cry of the dying in battle. Men maimed and broken scream for their mothers, who mercifully can't hear them. Posthumous medals for valor muffle the child and honor the warrior, but for a Gold Star Mother, ribbons and ceremony are as short-lived as the cherished remains being buried.
Without being a statistic, she, too, is a casualty of war. Heard in her strangled weeping are guttural pleas to God to ease the pain of losing a child. For this heartbroken woman, a coffin, even one draped in the American flag and carried by white-gloved Marines, is the grim totality of her forced enlistment into a war that breeched the refuge of home.
The bomb in this woman's living room is the conspicuous absence of her baby. Yes, baby, because no matter how old or how long deceased, the person for whom Taps are played only sleeps in his mother's heart. Naptime is eternity.
Mother's Day becomes a sad reminder and an accolade for her supreme contribution to patriotism. Or maybe it's a time to be angry and resentful — why my son or daughter? Pride crumples in a darkened room filled with pictures of a young man or woman whose potential bled out onto a foreign soil.
This imagined scenario is a relentless assault on memories of all the boo-boos she kissed and Superman Band-Aids plastered on scraped knees and dinged elbows. If only Mama could have been there to fix things, to make them better, to chase the monster away, to kiss away hurts one more time, then, maybe she, too, can stop crying.
Questions and accusations stifle remorse, but tears, like water, ever the enemy of rock, wear down resistance. Solace wrestles with acceptance, but grief takes on a presence of its own. Guided by ghosts, it is either torment or release from them.
When burying a child, remembrance is love and guilt is debilitating; however, my quantifying and simplifying a mother's loss and angst seems as unsentimental as some pot-bellied politician pontificating on Memorial Day.
How can anyone suppose a wound so deep that it bleeds concurrently with every thought of the initial one? Such trauma is personal, so much so, empathy even seems contrived.
In the middle of the night, this woman still awakens to the imagined cries of her baby, only to clutch a pillow instead. Holidays are a poignant reminder of her diminished family; her unwitting contribution to a distant conflict that ignored every mother's boundaries and snatched innocence as abruptly as the life she mourns. Her naiveté is six-feet under as well. The flag so gloriously waving in front of her home casts a shadow.
This Mother's Day, there are women embracing memories rather than their children. These mothers fully understand the costs of war and wonder if the old generals and politicians who enact them ever walk in a military cemetery and sob aloud? Do their sons and daughters wear our country's uniform and see active duty?
Do beribboned chests ever exhale and tremble at the sight of an old woman kneeling at Arlington? Her fingers lovingly touching a carved name as if it were warm and whispering back to her.
Maybe it is; maybe that's why her face is pressed against the stone so she can once again hear, "Mama, Mama."
- A Gold Star Mom from New Braunfels, Texas
Aaron and his mother, Tina - 1997
Tina's trust and faith made this tribute site possible
Honor isn't about making the right choices. It's about dealing with the consequences...
Another world, some other time
You lay your sanity on the line
Familiar faces, familiar sights
Reach back, remember with all your might...
And then you sense a change
Nothing feels the same
All your dreams are strange
Love comes walking in...
- Van Halen, 1986
Lindsey and Aaron
"Aaron was assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment, 4th Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, Fort Lewis, WA - But his true home was in Hampton Roads..." - Aaron's Gold Star mom, Tina
The term "Hampton Roads" is a centuries-old designation that originated when the region was a struggling English outpost nearly four hundred years ago. The name is believed to have originated from the combination of two separate words.
The word "Hampton" honors one of the founders of the Virginia Company of London and a great supporter of the colonization of Virginia, Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton. In the easternmost part of the new colony, downstream from Jamestown, the early administrative center was known as Elizabeth Cittie [sic], named for Princess Elizabeth, the daughter of King James I, and formally designated by the Virginia Company in 1619. (The Elizabeth River was also named for the princess).
The town at the center of Elizabeth Cittie became known as simply "Hampton", and a nearby waterway was designated Hampton Creek (also known as Hampton River). The town (and later city) of Hampton was the county seat of Elizabeth City County for over 300 years, until they were politically consolidated into the current large independent city known as Hampton, Virginia in 1952. The City of Hampton thus became one of the large Seven Cities of Hampton Roads, of which four others also grew to the larger sizes by consolidating with neighboring jurisdictions such as counties and towns in the mid-twentieth century...
The love that once was born can not die. For it has become part of us, of our life.
Woven into the very texture of our being...
Aaron - 6 months old
Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal...
The Honor and Remember flag pole, part of the Aaron Gautier Memorial currently being constructed at Aaron's family's home. Check back with us as more pictures are posted...
If 50 years from now you are a million miles away, and need the light of a special one to brighten up your day....
Just close your eyes and feel your heart and honestly believe... There's a piece of me inside your heart, and that piece will never leave...
- Anonymous
Aaron and his sister, Alexis
A baby boy is a blank check made payable to the human race...
- Barbara Christine Seifert
All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination, Imagination is the workshop of your mind, capable of turning mind energy into accomplishment and wealth...
Aaron and SSG Coady (his Drill Sergeant) on graduation day - Fort Benning, GA
Some choices we live not only once but a thousand times over, remembering them for the rest of our lives....
Transcript from the Nancy Grace show - 6/23/09
"Youth is, after all, just a moment, but it is the moment, the spark, that you always carry in your heart..."
- Raisa M. Gorbachev
Aaron in 1997
"It takes a long time to become young..."
- Pablo Picasso
Aaron on his 36 hour weekend pass during Basic Training - Fort Benning, GA
The Purple Heart is a United States military decoration awarded in the name of the President to those who have been wounded or killed while serving on or after April 5, 1917 with the U.S. military. The National Purple Heart Hall of Honor is located in New Windsor, New York.
The original idea for the Purple Heart (the Badge of Military Merit) is the oldest symbol and award that is still given to members of the U.S. military, surpassed in history only by the long obsolete Fidelity Medallion.
"Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee... calls back the lovely April of her prime..."
- William Shakespeare
"When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her children..."
- Sophia Loren
"In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed forever..."
- I Corinthians 15:52
What the eye does not admire the heart does not desire...
"Mama, Mama" is a universal cry of the dying in battle. Men maimed and broken scream for their mothers, who mercifully can't hear them. Posthumous medals for valor muffle the child and honor the warrior, but for a Gold Star Mother, ribbons and ceremony are as short-lived as the cherished remains being buried.
Without being a statistic, she, too, is a casualty of war. Heard in her strangled weeping are guttural pleas to God to ease the pain of losing a child. For this heartbroken woman, a coffin, even one draped in the American flag and carried by white-gloved Marines, is the grim totality of her forced enlistment into a war that breeched the refuge of home.
The bomb in this woman's living room is the conspicuous absence of her baby. Yes, baby, because no matter how old or how long deceased, the person for whom Taps are played only sleeps in his mother's heart. Naptime is eternity.
Mother's Day becomes a sad reminder and an accolade for her supreme contribution to patriotism. Or maybe it's a time to be angry and resentful — why my son or daughter? Pride crumples in a darkened room filled with pictures of a young man or woman whose potential bled out onto a foreign soil.
This imagined scenario is a relentless assault on memories of all the boo-boos she kissed and Superman Band-Aids plastered on scraped knees and dinged elbows. If only Mama could have been there to fix things, to make them better, to chase the monster away, to kiss away hurts one more time, then, maybe she, too, can stop crying.
Questions and accusations stifle remorse, but tears, like water, ever the enemy of rock, wear down resistance. Solace wrestles with acceptance, but grief takes on a presence of its own. Guided by ghosts, it is either torment or release from them.
When burying a child, remembrance is love and guilt is debilitating; however, my quantifying and simplifying a mother's loss and angst seems as unsentimental as some pot-bellied politician pontificating on Memorial Day.
How can anyone suppose a wound so deep that it bleeds concurrently with every thought of the initial one? Such trauma is personal, so much so, empathy even seems contrived.
In the middle of the night, this woman still awakens to the imagined cries of her baby, only to clutch a pillow instead. Holidays are a poignant reminder of her diminished family; her unwitting contribution to a distant conflict that ignored every mother's boundaries and snatched innocence as abruptly as the life she mourns. Her naiveté is six-feet under as well. The flag so gloriously waving in front of her home casts a shadow.
This Mother's Day, there are women embracing memories rather than their children. These mothers fully understand the costs of war and wonder if the old generals and politicians who enact them ever walk in a military cemetery and sob aloud? Do their sons and daughters wear our country's uniform and see active duty?
Do beribboned chests ever exhale and tremble at the sight of an old woman kneeling at Arlington? Her fingers lovingly touching a carved name as if it were warm and whispering back to her.
Maybe it is; maybe that's why her face is pressed against the stone so she can once again hear, "Mama, Mama."
- A Gold Star Mom from New Braunfels, Texas
Aaron and his mother, Tina - 1997
Tina's trust and faith made this tribute site possible
Honor isn't about making the right choices. It's about dealing with the consequences...
Another world, some other time
You lay your sanity on the line
Familiar faces, familiar sights
Reach back, remember with all your might...
And then you sense a change
Nothing feels the same
All your dreams are strange
Love comes walking in...
- Van Halen, 1986
Lindsey and Aaron
"Aaron was assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment, 4th Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, Fort Lewis, WA - But his true home was in Hampton Roads..." - Aaron's Gold Star mom, Tina
The term "Hampton Roads" is a centuries-old designation that originated when the region was a struggling English outpost nearly four hundred years ago. The name is believed to have originated from the combination of two separate words.
The word "Hampton" honors one of the founders of the Virginia Company of London and a great supporter of the colonization of Virginia, Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton. In the easternmost part of the new colony, downstream from Jamestown, the early administrative center was known as Elizabeth Cittie [sic], named for Princess Elizabeth, the daughter of King James I, and formally designated by the Virginia Company in 1619. (The Elizabeth River was also named for the princess).
The town at the center of Elizabeth Cittie became known as simply "Hampton", and a nearby waterway was designated Hampton Creek (also known as Hampton River). The town (and later city) of Hampton was the county seat of Elizabeth City County for over 300 years, until they were politically consolidated into the current large independent city known as Hampton, Virginia in 1952. The City of Hampton thus became one of the large Seven Cities of Hampton Roads, of which four others also grew to the larger sizes by consolidating with neighboring jurisdictions such as counties and towns in the mid-twentieth century...
The love that once was born can not die. For it has become part of us, of our life.
Woven into the very texture of our being...
Aaron - 6 months old
Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal...
The Honor and Remember flag pole, part of the Aaron Gautier Memorial currently being constructed at Aaron's family's home. Check back with us as more pictures are posted...
If 50 years from now you are a million miles away, and need the light of a special one to brighten up your day....
Just close your eyes and feel your heart and honestly believe... There's a piece of me inside your heart, and that piece will never leave...
- Anonymous
Aaron and his sister, Alexis
A baby boy is a blank check made payable to the human race...
- Barbara Christine Seifert
All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination, Imagination is the workshop of your mind, capable of turning mind energy into accomplishment and wealth...
Aaron and SSG Coady (his Drill Sergeant) on graduation day - Fort Benning, GA
Some choices we live not only once but a thousand times over, remembering them for the rest of our lives....
Transcript from the Nancy Grace show - 6/23/09
"Youth is, after all, just a moment, but it is the moment, the spark, that you always carry in your heart..."
- Raisa M. Gorbachev
Aaron in 1997
"It takes a long time to become young..."
- Pablo Picasso
Aaron on his 36 hour weekend pass during Basic Training - Fort Benning, GA
The Purple Heart is a United States military decoration awarded in the name of the President to those who have been wounded or killed while serving on or after April 5, 1917 with the U.S. military. The National Purple Heart Hall of Honor is located in New Windsor, New York.
The original idea for the Purple Heart (the Badge of Military Merit) is the oldest symbol and award that is still given to members of the U.S. military, surpassed in history only by the long obsolete Fidelity Medallion.
"Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee... calls back the lovely April of her prime..."
- William Shakespeare
"When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her children..."
- Sophia Loren
"In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed forever..."
- I Corinthians 15:52
What the eye does not admire the heart does not desire...
"Mama, Mama" is a universal cry of the dying in battle. Men maimed and broken scream for their mothers, who mercifully can't hear them. Posthumous medals for valor muffle the child and honor the warrior, but for a Gold Star Mother, ribbons and ceremony are as short-lived as the cherished remains being buried.
Without being a statistic, she, too, is a casualty of war. Heard in her strangled weeping are guttural pleas to God to ease the pain of losing a child. For this heartbroken woman, a coffin, even one draped in the American flag and carried by white-gloved Marines, is the grim totality of her forced enlistment into a war that breeched the refuge of home.
The bomb in this woman's living room is the conspicuous absence of her baby. Yes, baby, because no matter how old or how long deceased, the person for whom Taps are played only sleeps in his mother's heart. Naptime is eternity.
Mother's Day becomes a sad reminder and an accolade for her supreme contribution to patriotism. Or maybe it's a time to be angry and resentful — why my son or daughter? Pride crumples in a darkened room filled with pictures of a young man or woman whose potential bled out onto a foreign soil.
This imagined scenario is a relentless assault on memories of all the boo-boos she kissed and Superman Band-Aids plastered on scraped knees and dinged elbows. If only Mama could have been there to fix things, to make them better, to chase the monster away, to kiss away hurts one more time, then, maybe she, too, can stop crying.
Questions and accusations stifle remorse, but tears, like water, ever the enemy of rock, wear down resistance. Solace wrestles with acceptance, but grief takes on a presence of its own. Guided by ghosts, it is either torment or release from them.
When burying a child, remembrance is love and guilt is debilitating; however, my quantifying and simplifying a mother's loss and angst seems as unsentimental as some pot-bellied politician pontificating on Memorial Day.
How can anyone suppose a wound so deep that it bleeds concurrently with every thought of the initial one? Such trauma is personal, so much so, empathy even seems contrived.
In the middle of the night, this woman still awakens to the imagined cries of her baby, only to clutch a pillow instead. Holidays are a poignant reminder of her diminished family; her unwitting contribution to a distant conflict that ignored every mother's boundaries and snatched innocence as abruptly as the life she mourns. Her naiveté is six-feet under as well. The flag so gloriously waving in front of her home casts a shadow.
This Mother's Day, there are women embracing memories rather than their children. These mothers fully understand the costs of war and wonder if the old generals and politicians who enact them ever walk in a military cemetery and sob aloud? Do their sons and daughters wear our country's uniform and see active duty?
Do beribboned chests ever exhale and tremble at the sight of an old woman kneeling at Arlington? Her fingers lovingly touching a carved name as if it were warm and whispering back to her.
Maybe it is; maybe that's why her face is pressed against the stone so she can once again hear, "Mama, Mama."
- A Gold Star Mom from New Braunfels, Texas
Aaron and his mother, Tina - 1997
Tina's trust and faith made this tribute site possible
Honor isn't about making the right choices. It's about dealing with the consequences...
Another world, some other time
You lay your sanity on the line
Familiar faces, familiar sights
Reach back, remember with all your might...
And then you sense a change
Nothing feels the same
All your dreams are strange
Love comes walking in...
- Van Halen, 1986
Lindsey and Aaron
The term "Hampton Roads" is a centuries-old designation that originated when the region was a struggling English outpost nearly four hundred years ago. The name is believed to have originated from the combination of two separate words.
The word "Hampton" honors one of the founders of the Virginia Company of London and a great supporter of the colonization of Virginia, Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton. In the easternmost part of the new colony, downstream from Jamestown, the early administrative center was known as Elizabeth Cittie [sic], named for Princess Elizabeth, the daughter of King James I, and formally designated by the Virginia Company in 1619. (The Elizabeth River was also named for the princess).
The town at the center of Elizabeth Cittie became known as simply "Hampton", and a nearby waterway was designated Hampton Creek (also known as Hampton River). The town (and later city) of Hampton was the county seat of Elizabeth City County for over 300 years, until they were politically consolidated into the current large independent city known as Hampton, Virginia in 1952. The City of Hampton thus became one of the large Seven Cities of Hampton Roads, of which four others also grew to the larger sizes by consolidating with neighboring jurisdictions such as counties and towns in the mid-twentieth century...
The love that once was born can not die. For it has become part of us, of our life.
Woven into the very texture of our being...
Aaron - 6 months old
Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal...
The Honor and Remember flag pole, part of the Aaron Gautier Memorial currently being constructed at Aaron's family's home. Check back with us as more pictures are posted...
If 50 years from now you are a million miles away, and need the light of a special one to brighten up your day....
Just close your eyes and feel your heart and honestly believe... There's a piece of me inside your heart, and that piece will never leave...
- Anonymous
Aaron and his sister, Alexis
A baby boy is a blank check made payable to the human race...
- Barbara Christine Seifert
All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination, Imagination is the workshop of your mind, capable of turning mind energy into accomplishment and wealth...
Aaron and SSG Coady (his Drill Sergeant) on graduation day - Fort Benning, GA
Some choices we live not only once but a thousand times over, remembering them for the rest of our lives....
Transcript from the Nancy Grace show - 6/23/09
"Youth is, after all, just a moment, but it is the moment, the spark, that you always carry in your heart..."
- Raisa M. Gorbachev
Aaron in 1997
"It takes a long time to become young..."
- Pablo Picasso
Aaron on his 36 hour weekend pass during Basic Training - Fort Benning, GA
The Purple Heart is a United States military decoration awarded in the name of the President to those who have been wounded or killed while serving on or after April 5, 1917 with the U.S. military. The National Purple Heart Hall of Honor is located in New Windsor, New York.
The original idea for the Purple Heart (the Badge of Military Merit) is the oldest symbol and award that is still given to members of the U.S. military, surpassed in history only by the long obsolete Fidelity Medallion.
"Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee... calls back the lovely April of her prime..."
- William Shakespeare
"When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her children..."
- Sophia Loren
"In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed forever..."
- I Corinthians 15:52
What the eye does not admire the heart does not desire...
"Mama, Mama" is a universal cry of the dying in battle. Men maimed and broken scream for their mothers, who mercifully can't hear them. Posthumous medals for valor muffle the child and honor the warrior, but for a Gold Star Mother, ribbons and ceremony are as short-lived as the cherished remains being buried.
Without being a statistic, she, too, is a casualty of war. Heard in her strangled weeping are guttural pleas to God to ease the pain of losing a child. For this heartbroken woman, a coffin, even one draped in the American flag and carried by white-gloved Marines, is the grim totality of her forced enlistment into a war that breeched the refuge of home.
The bomb in this woman's living room is the conspicuous absence of her baby. Yes, baby, because no matter how old or how long deceased, the person for whom Taps are played only sleeps in his mother's heart. Naptime is eternity.
Mother's Day becomes a sad reminder and an accolade for her supreme contribution to patriotism. Or maybe it's a time to be angry and resentful — why my son or daughter? Pride crumples in a darkened room filled with pictures of a young man or woman whose potential bled out onto a foreign soil.
This imagined scenario is a relentless assault on memories of all the boo-boos she kissed and Superman Band-Aids plastered on scraped knees and dinged elbows. If only Mama could have been there to fix things, to make them better, to chase the monster away, to kiss away hurts one more time, then, maybe she, too, can stop crying.
Questions and accusations stifle remorse, but tears, like water, ever the enemy of rock, wear down resistance. Solace wrestles with acceptance, but grief takes on a presence of its own. Guided by ghosts, it is either torment or release from them.
When burying a child, remembrance is love and guilt is debilitating; however, my quantifying and simplifying a mother's loss and angst seems as unsentimental as some pot-bellied politician pontificating on Memorial Day.
How can anyone suppose a wound so deep that it bleeds concurrently with every thought of the initial one? Such trauma is personal, so much so, empathy even seems contrived.
In the middle of the night, this woman still awakens to the imagined cries of her baby, only to clutch a pillow instead. Holidays are a poignant reminder of her diminished family; her unwitting contribution to a distant conflict that ignored every mother's boundaries and snatched innocence as abruptly as the life she mourns. Her naiveté is six-feet under as well. The flag so gloriously waving in front of her home casts a shadow.
This Mother's Day, there are women embracing memories rather than their children. These mothers fully understand the costs of war and wonder if the old generals and politicians who enact them ever walk in a military cemetery and sob aloud? Do their sons and daughters wear our country's uniform and see active duty?
Do beribboned chests ever exhale and tremble at the sight of an old woman kneeling at Arlington? Her fingers lovingly touching a carved name as if it were warm and whispering back to her.
Maybe it is; maybe that's why her face is pressed against the stone so she can once again hear, "Mama, Mama."
- A Gold Star Mom from New Braunfels, Texas
Aaron and his mother, Tina - 1997
Tina's trust and faith made this tribute site possible
Honor isn't about making the right choices. It's about dealing with the consequences...
Another world, some other time
You lay your sanity on the line
Familiar faces, familiar sights
Reach back, remember with all your might...
And then you sense a change
Nothing feels the same
All your dreams are strange
Love comes walking in...
- Van Halen, 1986
Lindsey and Aaron
The love that once was born can not die. For it has become part of us, of our life.
Woven into the very texture of our being...
Aaron - 6 months old
Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal...
The Honor and Remember flag pole, part of the Aaron Gautier Memorial currently being constructed at Aaron's family's home. Check back with us as more pictures are posted...
If 50 years from now you are a million miles away, and need the light of a special one to brighten up your day....
Just close your eyes and feel your heart and honestly believe... There's a piece of me inside your heart, and that piece will never leave...
- Anonymous
Aaron and his sister, Alexis
A baby boy is a blank check made payable to the human race...
- Barbara Christine Seifert
All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination, Imagination is the workshop of your mind, capable of turning mind energy into accomplishment and wealth...
Aaron and SSG Coady (his Drill Sergeant) on graduation day - Fort Benning, GA
Some choices we live not only once but a thousand times over, remembering them for the rest of our lives....
Transcript from the Nancy Grace show - 6/23/09
"Youth is, after all, just a moment, but it is the moment, the spark, that you always carry in your heart..."
- Raisa M. Gorbachev
Aaron in 1997
"It takes a long time to become young..."
- Pablo Picasso
Aaron on his 36 hour weekend pass during Basic Training - Fort Benning, GA
The Purple Heart is a United States military decoration awarded in the name of the President to those who have been wounded or killed while serving on or after April 5, 1917 with the U.S. military. The National Purple Heart Hall of Honor is located in New Windsor, New York.
The original idea for the Purple Heart (the Badge of Military Merit) is the oldest symbol and award that is still given to members of the U.S. military, surpassed in history only by the long obsolete Fidelity Medallion.
"Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee... calls back the lovely April of her prime..."
- William Shakespeare
"When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her children..."
- Sophia Loren
"In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed forever..."
- I Corinthians 15:52
What the eye does not admire the heart does not desire...
"Mama, Mama" is a universal cry of the dying in battle. Men maimed and broken scream for their mothers, who mercifully can't hear them. Posthumous medals for valor muffle the child and honor the warrior, but for a Gold Star Mother, ribbons and ceremony are as short-lived as the cherished remains being buried.
Without being a statistic, she, too, is a casualty of war. Heard in her strangled weeping are guttural pleas to God to ease the pain of losing a child. For this heartbroken woman, a coffin, even one draped in the American flag and carried by white-gloved Marines, is the grim totality of her forced enlistment into a war that breeched the refuge of home.
The bomb in this woman's living room is the conspicuous absence of her baby. Yes, baby, because no matter how old or how long deceased, the person for whom Taps are played only sleeps in his mother's heart. Naptime is eternity.
Mother's Day becomes a sad reminder and an accolade for her supreme contribution to patriotism. Or maybe it's a time to be angry and resentful — why my son or daughter? Pride crumples in a darkened room filled with pictures of a young man or woman whose potential bled out onto a foreign soil.
This imagined scenario is a relentless assault on memories of all the boo-boos she kissed and Superman Band-Aids plastered on scraped knees and dinged elbows. If only Mama could have been there to fix things, to make them better, to chase the monster away, to kiss away hurts one more time, then, maybe she, too, can stop crying.
Questions and accusations stifle remorse, but tears, like water, ever the enemy of rock, wear down resistance. Solace wrestles with acceptance, but grief takes on a presence of its own. Guided by ghosts, it is either torment or release from them.
When burying a child, remembrance is love and guilt is debilitating; however, my quantifying and simplifying a mother's loss and angst seems as unsentimental as some pot-bellied politician pontificating on Memorial Day.
How can anyone suppose a wound so deep that it bleeds concurrently with every thought of the initial one? Such trauma is personal, so much so, empathy even seems contrived.
In the middle of the night, this woman still awakens to the imagined cries of her baby, only to clutch a pillow instead. Holidays are a poignant reminder of her diminished family; her unwitting contribution to a distant conflict that ignored every mother's boundaries and snatched innocence as abruptly as the life she mourns. Her naiveté is six-feet under as well. The flag so gloriously waving in front of her home casts a shadow.
This Mother's Day, there are women embracing memories rather than their children. These mothers fully understand the costs of war and wonder if the old generals and politicians who enact them ever walk in a military cemetery and sob aloud? Do their sons and daughters wear our country's uniform and see active duty?
Do beribboned chests ever exhale and tremble at the sight of an old woman kneeling at Arlington? Her fingers lovingly touching a carved name as if it were warm and whispering back to her.
Maybe it is; maybe that's why her face is pressed against the stone so she can once again hear, "Mama, Mama."
- A Gold Star Mom from New Braunfels, Texas
Aaron and his mother, Tina - 1997
Tina's trust and faith made this tribute site possible
Honor isn't about making the right choices. It's about dealing with the consequences...
Another world, some other time
You lay your sanity on the line
Familiar faces, familiar sights
Reach back, remember with all your might...
And then you sense a change
Nothing feels the same
All your dreams are strange
Love comes walking in...
- Van Halen, 1986
Lindsey and Aaron
The love that once was born can not die. For it has become part of us, of our life.
Woven into the very texture of our being...
Aaron - 6 months old
Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal...
The Honor and Remember flag pole, part of the Aaron Gautier Memorial currently being constructed at Aaron's family's home. Check back with us as more pictures are posted...
If 50 years from now you are a million miles away, and need the light of a special one to brighten up your day....
Just close your eyes and feel your heart and honestly believe... There's a piece of me inside your heart, and that piece will never leave...
- Anonymous
Aaron and his sister, Alexis
A baby boy is a blank check made payable to the human race...
- Barbara Christine Seifert
All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination, Imagination is the workshop of your mind, capable of turning mind energy into accomplishment and wealth...
Aaron and SSG Coady (his Drill Sergeant) on graduation day - Fort Benning, GA
Some choices we live not only once but a thousand times over, remembering them for the rest of our lives....
Transcript from the Nancy Grace show - 6/23/09
"Youth is, after all, just a moment, but it is the moment, the spark, that you always carry in your heart..."
- Raisa M. Gorbachev
Aaron in 1997
"It takes a long time to become young..."
- Pablo Picasso
Aaron on his 36 hour weekend pass during Basic Training - Fort Benning, GA
The Purple Heart is a United States military decoration awarded in the name of the President to those who have been wounded or killed while serving on or after April 5, 1917 with the U.S. military. The National Purple Heart Hall of Honor is located in New Windsor, New York.
The original idea for the Purple Heart (the Badge of Military Merit) is the oldest symbol and award that is still given to members of the U.S. military, surpassed in history only by the long obsolete Fidelity Medallion.
"Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee... calls back the lovely April of her prime..."
- William Shakespeare
"When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her children..."
- Sophia Loren
"In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed forever..."
- I Corinthians 15:52
What the eye does not admire the heart does not desire...
"Mama, Mama" is a universal cry of the dying in battle. Men maimed and broken scream for their mothers, who mercifully can't hear them. Posthumous medals for valor muffle the child and honor the warrior, but for a Gold Star Mother, ribbons and ceremony are as short-lived as the cherished remains being buried.
Without being a statistic, she, too, is a casualty of war. Heard in her strangled weeping are guttural pleas to God to ease the pain of losing a child. For this heartbroken woman, a coffin, even one draped in the American flag and carried by white-gloved Marines, is the grim totality of her forced enlistment into a war that breeched the refuge of home.
The bomb in this woman's living room is the conspicuous absence of her baby. Yes, baby, because no matter how old or how long deceased, the person for whom Taps are played only sleeps in his mother's heart. Naptime is eternity.
Mother's Day becomes a sad reminder and an accolade for her supreme contribution to patriotism. Or maybe it's a time to be angry and resentful — why my son or daughter? Pride crumples in a darkened room filled with pictures of a young man or woman whose potential bled out onto a foreign soil.
This imagined scenario is a relentless assault on memories of all the boo-boos she kissed and Superman Band-Aids plastered on scraped knees and dinged elbows. If only Mama could have been there to fix things, to make them better, to chase the monster away, to kiss away hurts one more time, then, maybe she, too, can stop crying.
Questions and accusations stifle remorse, but tears, like water, ever the enemy of rock, wear down resistance. Solace wrestles with acceptance, but grief takes on a presence of its own. Guided by ghosts, it is either torment or release from them.
When burying a child, remembrance is love and guilt is debilitating; however, my quantifying and simplifying a mother's loss and angst seems as unsentimental as some pot-bellied politician pontificating on Memorial Day.
How can anyone suppose a wound so deep that it bleeds concurrently with every thought of the initial one? Such trauma is personal, so much so, empathy even seems contrived.
In the middle of the night, this woman still awakens to the imagined cries of her baby, only to clutch a pillow instead. Holidays are a poignant reminder of her diminished family; her unwitting contribution to a distant conflict that ignored every mother's boundaries and snatched innocence as abruptly as the life she mourns. Her naiveté is six-feet under as well. The flag so gloriously waving in front of her home casts a shadow.
This Mother's Day, there are women embracing memories rather than their children. These mothers fully understand the costs of war and wonder if the old generals and politicians who enact them ever walk in a military cemetery and sob aloud? Do their sons and daughters wear our country's uniform and see active duty?
Do beribboned chests ever exhale and tremble at the sight of an old woman kneeling at Arlington? Her fingers lovingly touching a carved name as if it were warm and whispering back to her.
Maybe it is; maybe that's why her face is pressed against the stone so she can once again hear, "Mama, Mama."
- A Gold Star Mom from New Braunfels, Texas
Aaron and his mother, Tina - 1997
Tina's trust and faith made this tribute site possible
Honor isn't about making the right choices. It's about dealing with the consequences...
Another world, some other time
You lay your sanity on the line
Familiar faces, familiar sights
Reach back, remember with all your might...
And then you sense a change
Nothing feels the same
All your dreams are strange
Love comes walking in...
- Van Halen, 1986
Lindsey and Aaron
Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal...
The Honor and Remember flag pole, part of the Aaron Gautier Memorial currently being constructed at Aaron's family's home. Check back with us as more pictures are posted...
If 50 years from now you are a million miles away, and need the light of a special one to brighten up your day....
Just close your eyes and feel your heart and honestly believe... There's a piece of me inside your heart, and that piece will never leave...
- Anonymous
Aaron and his sister, Alexis
A baby boy is a blank check made payable to the human race...
- Barbara Christine Seifert
All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination, Imagination is the workshop of your mind, capable of turning mind energy into accomplishment and wealth...
Aaron and SSG Coady (his Drill Sergeant) on graduation day - Fort Benning, GA
Some choices we live not only once but a thousand times over, remembering them for the rest of our lives....
Transcript from the Nancy Grace show - 6/23/09
"Youth is, after all, just a moment, but it is the moment, the spark, that you always carry in your heart..."
- Raisa M. Gorbachev
Aaron in 1997
"It takes a long time to become young..."
- Pablo Picasso
Aaron on his 36 hour weekend pass during Basic Training - Fort Benning, GA
The Purple Heart is a United States military decoration awarded in the name of the President to those who have been wounded or killed while serving on or after April 5, 1917 with the U.S. military. The National Purple Heart Hall of Honor is located in New Windsor, New York.
The original idea for the Purple Heart (the Badge of Military Merit) is the oldest symbol and award that is still given to members of the U.S. military, surpassed in history only by the long obsolete Fidelity Medallion.
"Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee... calls back the lovely April of her prime..."
- William Shakespeare
"When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her children..."
- Sophia Loren
"In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed forever..."
- I Corinthians 15:52
What the eye does not admire the heart does not desire...
"Mama, Mama" is a universal cry of the dying in battle. Men maimed and broken scream for their mothers, who mercifully can't hear them. Posthumous medals for valor muffle the child and honor the warrior, but for a Gold Star Mother, ribbons and ceremony are as short-lived as the cherished remains being buried.
Without being a statistic, she, too, is a casualty of war. Heard in her strangled weeping are guttural pleas to God to ease the pain of losing a child. For this heartbroken woman, a coffin, even one draped in the American flag and carried by white-gloved Marines, is the grim totality of her forced enlistment into a war that breeched the refuge of home.
The bomb in this woman's living room is the conspicuous absence of her baby. Yes, baby, because no matter how old or how long deceased, the person for whom Taps are played only sleeps in his mother's heart. Naptime is eternity.
Mother's Day becomes a sad reminder and an accolade for her supreme contribution to patriotism. Or maybe it's a time to be angry and resentful — why my son or daughter? Pride crumples in a darkened room filled with pictures of a young man or woman whose potential bled out onto a foreign soil.
This imagined scenario is a relentless assault on memories of all the boo-boos she kissed and Superman Band-Aids plastered on scraped knees and dinged elbows. If only Mama could have been there to fix things, to make them better, to chase the monster away, to kiss away hurts one more time, then, maybe she, too, can stop crying.
Questions and accusations stifle remorse, but tears, like water, ever the enemy of rock, wear down resistance. Solace wrestles with acceptance, but grief takes on a presence of its own. Guided by ghosts, it is either torment or release from them.
When burying a child, remembrance is love and guilt is debilitating; however, my quantifying and simplifying a mother's loss and angst seems as unsentimental as some pot-bellied politician pontificating on Memorial Day.
How can anyone suppose a wound so deep that it bleeds concurrently with every thought of the initial one? Such trauma is personal, so much so, empathy even seems contrived.
In the middle of the night, this woman still awakens to the imagined cries of her baby, only to clutch a pillow instead. Holidays are a poignant reminder of her diminished family; her unwitting contribution to a distant conflict that ignored every mother's boundaries and snatched innocence as abruptly as the life she mourns. Her naiveté is six-feet under as well. The flag so gloriously waving in front of her home casts a shadow.
This Mother's Day, there are women embracing memories rather than their children. These mothers fully understand the costs of war and wonder if the old generals and politicians who enact them ever walk in a military cemetery and sob aloud? Do their sons and daughters wear our country's uniform and see active duty?
Do beribboned chests ever exhale and tremble at the sight of an old woman kneeling at Arlington? Her fingers lovingly touching a carved name as if it were warm and whispering back to her.
Maybe it is; maybe that's why her face is pressed against the stone so she can once again hear, "Mama, Mama."
- A Gold Star Mom from New Braunfels, Texas
Aaron and his mother, Tina - 1997
Tina's trust and faith made this tribute site possible
Honor isn't about making the right choices. It's about dealing with the consequences...
Another world, some other time
You lay your sanity on the line
Familiar faces, familiar sights
Reach back, remember with all your might...
And then you sense a change
Nothing feels the same
All your dreams are strange
Love comes walking in...
- Van Halen, 1986
Lindsey and Aaron
Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal...
The Honor and Remember flag pole, part of the Aaron Gautier Memorial currently being constructed at Aaron's family's home. Check back with us as more pictures are posted...
If 50 years from now you are a million miles away, and need the light of a special one to brighten up your day....
Just close your eyes and feel your heart and honestly believe... There's a piece of me inside your heart, and that piece will never leave...
- Anonymous
Aaron and his sister, Alexis
A baby boy is a blank check made payable to the human race...
- Barbara Christine Seifert
All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination, Imagination is the workshop of your mind, capable of turning mind energy into accomplishment and wealth...
Aaron and SSG Coady (his Drill Sergeant) on graduation day - Fort Benning, GA
Some choices we live not only once but a thousand times over, remembering them for the rest of our lives....
Transcript from the Nancy Grace show - 6/23/09
"Youth is, after all, just a moment, but it is the moment, the spark, that you always carry in your heart..."
- Raisa M. Gorbachev
Aaron in 1997
"It takes a long time to become young..."
- Pablo Picasso
Aaron on his 36 hour weekend pass during Basic Training - Fort Benning, GA
The Purple Heart is a United States military decoration awarded in the name of the President to those who have been wounded or killed while serving on or after April 5, 1917 with the U.S. military. The National Purple Heart Hall of Honor is located in New Windsor, New York.
The original idea for the Purple Heart (the Badge of Military Merit) is the oldest symbol and award that is still given to members of the U.S. military, surpassed in history only by the long obsolete Fidelity Medallion.
"Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee... calls back the lovely April of her prime..."
- William Shakespeare
"When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her children..."
- Sophia Loren
"In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed forever..."
- I Corinthians 15:52
What the eye does not admire the heart does not desire...
"Mama, Mama" is a universal cry of the dying in battle. Men maimed and broken scream for their mothers, who mercifully can't hear them. Posthumous medals for valor muffle the child and honor the warrior, but for a Gold Star Mother, ribbons and ceremony are as short-lived as the cherished remains being buried.
Without being a statistic, she, too, is a casualty of war. Heard in her strangled weeping are guttural pleas to God to ease the pain of losing a child. For this heartbroken woman, a coffin, even one draped in the American flag and carried by white-gloved Marines, is the grim totality of her forced enlistment into a war that breeched the refuge of home.
The bomb in this woman's living room is the conspicuous absence of her baby. Yes, baby, because no matter how old or how long deceased, the person for whom Taps are played only sleeps in his mother's heart. Naptime is eternity.
Mother's Day becomes a sad reminder and an accolade for her supreme contribution to patriotism. Or maybe it's a time to be angry and resentful — why my son or daughter? Pride crumples in a darkened room filled with pictures of a young man or woman whose potential bled out onto a foreign soil.
This imagined scenario is a relentless assault on memories of all the boo-boos she kissed and Superman Band-Aids plastered on scraped knees and dinged elbows. If only Mama could have been there to fix things, to make them better, to chase the monster away, to kiss away hurts one more time, then, maybe she, too, can stop crying.
Questions and accusations stifle remorse, but tears, like water, ever the enemy of rock, wear down resistance. Solace wrestles with acceptance, but grief takes on a presence of its own. Guided by ghosts, it is either torment or release from them.
When burying a child, remembrance is love and guilt is debilitating; however, my quantifying and simplifying a mother's loss and angst seems as unsentimental as some pot-bellied politician pontificating on Memorial Day.
How can anyone suppose a wound so deep that it bleeds concurrently with every thought of the initial one? Such trauma is personal, so much so, empathy even seems contrived.
In the middle of the night, this woman still awakens to the imagined cries of her baby, only to clutch a pillow instead. Holidays are a poignant reminder of her diminished family; her unwitting contribution to a distant conflict that ignored every mother's boundaries and snatched innocence as abruptly as the life she mourns. Her naiveté is six-feet under as well. The flag so gloriously waving in front of her home casts a shadow.
This Mother's Day, there are women embracing memories rather than their children. These mothers fully understand the costs of war and wonder if the old generals and politicians who enact them ever walk in a military cemetery and sob aloud? Do their sons and daughters wear our country's uniform and see active duty?
Do beribboned chests ever exhale and tremble at the sight of an old woman kneeling at Arlington? Her fingers lovingly touching a carved name as if it were warm and whispering back to her.
Maybe it is; maybe that's why her face is pressed against the stone so she can once again hear, "Mama, Mama."
- A Gold Star Mom from New Braunfels, Texas
Aaron and his mother, Tina - 1997
Tina's trust and faith made this tribute site possible
Honor isn't about making the right choices. It's about dealing with the consequences...
Another world, some other time
You lay your sanity on the line
Familiar faces, familiar sights
Reach back, remember with all your might...
And then you sense a change
Nothing feels the same
All your dreams are strange
Love comes walking in...
- Van Halen, 1986
Lindsey and Aaron
The Honor and Remember flag pole, part of the Aaron Gautier Memorial currently being constructed at Aaron's family's home. Check back with us as more pictures are posted...
If 50 years from now you are a million miles away, and need the light of a special one to brighten up your day....
Just close your eyes and feel your heart and honestly believe... There's a piece of me inside your heart, and that piece will never leave...
- Anonymous
Aaron and his sister, Alexis
A baby boy is a blank check made payable to the human race...
- Barbara Christine Seifert
All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination, Imagination is the workshop of your mind, capable of turning mind energy into accomplishment and wealth...
Aaron and SSG Coady (his Drill Sergeant) on graduation day - Fort Benning, GA
Some choices we live not only once but a thousand times over, remembering them for the rest of our lives....
Transcript from the Nancy Grace show - 6/23/09
"Youth is, after all, just a moment, but it is the moment, the spark, that you always carry in your heart..."
- Raisa M. Gorbachev
Aaron in 1997
"It takes a long time to become young..."
- Pablo Picasso
Aaron on his 36 hour weekend pass during Basic Training - Fort Benning, GA
The Purple Heart is a United States military decoration awarded in the name of the President to those who have been wounded or killed while serving on or after April 5, 1917 with the U.S. military. The National Purple Heart Hall of Honor is located in New Windsor, New York.
The original idea for the Purple Heart (the Badge of Military Merit) is the oldest symbol and award that is still given to members of the U.S. military, surpassed in history only by the long obsolete Fidelity Medallion.
"Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee... calls back the lovely April of her prime..."
- William Shakespeare
"When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her children..."
- Sophia Loren
"In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed forever..."
- I Corinthians 15:52
What the eye does not admire the heart does not desire...
"Mama, Mama" is a universal cry of the dying in battle. Men maimed and broken scream for their mothers, who mercifully can't hear them. Posthumous medals for valor muffle the child and honor the warrior, but for a Gold Star Mother, ribbons and ceremony are as short-lived as the cherished remains being buried.
Without being a statistic, she, too, is a casualty of war. Heard in her strangled weeping are guttural pleas to God to ease the pain of losing a child. For this heartbroken woman, a coffin, even one draped in the American flag and carried by white-gloved Marines, is the grim totality of her forced enlistment into a war that breeched the refuge of home.
The bomb in this woman's living room is the conspicuous absence of her baby. Yes, baby, because no matter how old or how long deceased, the person for whom Taps are played only sleeps in his mother's heart. Naptime is eternity.
Mother's Day becomes a sad reminder and an accolade for her supreme contribution to patriotism. Or maybe it's a time to be angry and resentful — why my son or daughter? Pride crumples in a darkened room filled with pictures of a young man or woman whose potential bled out onto a foreign soil.
This imagined scenario is a relentless assault on memories of all the boo-boos she kissed and Superman Band-Aids plastered on scraped knees and dinged elbows. If only Mama could have been there to fix things, to make them better, to chase the monster away, to kiss away hurts one more time, then, maybe she, too, can stop crying.
Questions and accusations stifle remorse, but tears, like water, ever the enemy of rock, wear down resistance. Solace wrestles with acceptance, but grief takes on a presence of its own. Guided by ghosts, it is either torment or release from them.
When burying a child, remembrance is love and guilt is debilitating; however, my quantifying and simplifying a mother's loss and angst seems as unsentimental as some pot-bellied politician pontificating on Memorial Day.
How can anyone suppose a wound so deep that it bleeds concurrently with every thought of the initial one? Such trauma is personal, so much so, empathy even seems contrived.
In the middle of the night, this woman still awakens to the imagined cries of her baby, only to clutch a pillow instead. Holidays are a poignant reminder of her diminished family; her unwitting contribution to a distant conflict that ignored every mother's boundaries and snatched innocence as abruptly as the life she mourns. Her naiveté is six-feet under as well. The flag so gloriously waving in front of her home casts a shadow.
This Mother's Day, there are women embracing memories rather than their children. These mothers fully understand the costs of war and wonder if the old generals and politicians who enact them ever walk in a military cemetery and sob aloud? Do their sons and daughters wear our country's uniform and see active duty?
Do beribboned chests ever exhale and tremble at the sight of an old woman kneeling at Arlington? Her fingers lovingly touching a carved name as if it were warm and whispering back to her.
Maybe it is; maybe that's why her face is pressed against the stone so she can once again hear, "Mama, Mama."
- A Gold Star Mom from New Braunfels, Texas
Aaron and his mother, Tina - 1997
Tina's trust and faith made this tribute site possible
Honor isn't about making the right choices. It's about dealing with the consequences...
Another world, some other time
You lay your sanity on the line
Familiar faces, familiar sights
Reach back, remember with all your might...
And then you sense a change
Nothing feels the same
All your dreams are strange
Love comes walking in...
- Van Halen, 1986
Lindsey and Aaron
If 50 years from now you are a million miles away, and need the light of a special one to brighten up your day....
Just close your eyes and feel your heart and honestly believe... There's a piece of me inside your heart, and that piece will never leave...
- Anonymous
Aaron and his sister, Alexis
A baby boy is a blank check made payable to the human race...
- Barbara Christine Seifert
All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination, Imagination is the workshop of your mind, capable of turning mind energy into accomplishment and wealth...
Aaron and SSG Coady (his Drill Sergeant) on graduation day - Fort Benning, GA
Some choices we live not only once but a thousand times over, remembering them for the rest of our lives....
Transcript from the Nancy Grace show - 6/23/09
"Youth is, after all, just a moment, but it is the moment, the spark, that you always carry in your heart..."
- Raisa M. Gorbachev
Aaron in 1997
"It takes a long time to become young..."
- Pablo Picasso
Aaron on his 36 hour weekend pass during Basic Training - Fort Benning, GA
The Purple Heart is a United States military decoration awarded in the name of the President to those who have been wounded or killed while serving on or after April 5, 1917 with the U.S. military. The National Purple Heart Hall of Honor is located in New Windsor, New York.
The original idea for the Purple Heart (the Badge of Military Merit) is the oldest symbol and award that is still given to members of the U.S. military, surpassed in history only by the long obsolete Fidelity Medallion.
"Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee... calls back the lovely April of her prime..."
- William Shakespeare
"When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her children..."
- Sophia Loren
"In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed forever..."
- I Corinthians 15:52
What the eye does not admire the heart does not desire...
"Mama, Mama" is a universal cry of the dying in battle. Men maimed and broken scream for their mothers, who mercifully can't hear them. Posthumous medals for valor muffle the child and honor the warrior, but for a Gold Star Mother, ribbons and ceremony are as short-lived as the cherished remains being buried.
Without being a statistic, she, too, is a casualty of war. Heard in her strangled weeping are guttural pleas to God to ease the pain of losing a child. For this heartbroken woman, a coffin, even one draped in the American flag and carried by white-gloved Marines, is the grim totality of her forced enlistment into a war that breeched the refuge of home.
The bomb in this woman's living room is the conspicuous absence of her baby. Yes, baby, because no matter how old or how long deceased, the person for whom Taps are played only sleeps in his mother's heart. Naptime is eternity.
Mother's Day becomes a sad reminder and an accolade for her supreme contribution to patriotism. Or maybe it's a time to be angry and resentful — why my son or daughter? Pride crumples in a darkened room filled with pictures of a young man or woman whose potential bled out onto a foreign soil.
This imagined scenario is a relentless assault on memories of all the boo-boos she kissed and Superman Band-Aids plastered on scraped knees and dinged elbows. If only Mama could have been there to fix things, to make them better, to chase the monster away, to kiss away hurts one more time, then, maybe she, too, can stop crying.
Questions and accusations stifle remorse, but tears, like water, ever the enemy of rock, wear down resistance. Solace wrestles with acceptance, but grief takes on a presence of its own. Guided by ghosts, it is either torment or release from them.
When burying a child, remembrance is love and guilt is debilitating; however, my quantifying and simplifying a mother's loss and angst seems as unsentimental as some pot-bellied politician pontificating on Memorial Day.
How can anyone suppose a wound so deep that it bleeds concurrently with every thought of the initial one? Such trauma is personal, so much so, empathy even seems contrived.
In the middle of the night, this woman still awakens to the imagined cries of her baby, only to clutch a pillow instead. Holidays are a poignant reminder of her diminished family; her unwitting contribution to a distant conflict that ignored every mother's boundaries and snatched innocence as abruptly as the life she mourns. Her naiveté is six-feet under as well. The flag so gloriously waving in front of her home casts a shadow.
This Mother's Day, there are women embracing memories rather than their children. These mothers fully understand the costs of war and wonder if the old generals and politicians who enact them ever walk in a military cemetery and sob aloud? Do their sons and daughters wear our country's uniform and see active duty?
Do beribboned chests ever exhale and tremble at the sight of an old woman kneeling at Arlington? Her fingers lovingly touching a carved name as if it were warm and whispering back to her.
Maybe it is; maybe that's why her face is pressed against the stone so she can once again hear, "Mama, Mama."
- A Gold Star Mom from New Braunfels, Texas
Aaron and his mother, Tina - 1997
Tina's trust and faith made this tribute site possible
Honor isn't about making the right choices. It's about dealing with the consequences...
Another world, some other time
You lay your sanity on the line
Familiar faces, familiar sights
Reach back, remember with all your might...
And then you sense a change
Nothing feels the same
All your dreams are strange
Love comes walking in...
- Van Halen, 1986
Lindsey and Aaron
If 50 years from now you are a million miles away, and need the light of a special one to brighten up your day....
Just close your eyes and feel your heart and honestly believe... There's a piece of me inside your heart, and that piece will never leave...
- Anonymous
Aaron and his sister, Alexis
A baby boy is a blank check made payable to the human race...
- Barbara Christine Seifert
All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination, Imagination is the workshop of your mind, capable of turning mind energy into accomplishment and wealth...
Aaron and SSG Coady (his Drill Sergeant) on graduation day - Fort Benning, GA
Some choices we live not only once but a thousand times over, remembering them for the rest of our lives....
Transcript from the Nancy Grace show - 6/23/09
"Youth is, after all, just a moment, but it is the moment, the spark, that you always carry in your heart..."
- Raisa M. Gorbachev
Aaron in 1997
"It takes a long time to become young..."
- Pablo Picasso
Aaron on his 36 hour weekend pass during Basic Training - Fort Benning, GA
The Purple Heart is a United States military decoration awarded in the name of the President to those who have been wounded or killed while serving on or after April 5, 1917 with the U.S. military. The National Purple Heart Hall of Honor is located in New Windsor, New York.
The original idea for the Purple Heart (the Badge of Military Merit) is the oldest symbol and award that is still given to members of the U.S. military, surpassed in history only by the long obsolete Fidelity Medallion.
"Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee... calls back the lovely April of her prime..."
- William Shakespeare
"When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her children..."
- Sophia Loren
"In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed forever..."
- I Corinthians 15:52
What the eye does not admire the heart does not desire...
"Mama, Mama" is a universal cry of the dying in battle. Men maimed and broken scream for their mothers, who mercifully can't hear them. Posthumous medals for valor muffle the child and honor the warrior, but for a Gold Star Mother, ribbons and ceremony are as short-lived as the cherished remains being buried.
Without being a statistic, she, too, is a casualty of war. Heard in her strangled weeping are guttural pleas to God to ease the pain of losing a child. For this heartbroken woman, a coffin, even one draped in the American flag and carried by white-gloved Marines, is the grim totality of her forced enlistment into a war that breeched the refuge of home.
The bomb in this woman's living room is the conspicuous absence of her baby. Yes, baby, because no matter how old or how long deceased, the person for whom Taps are played only sleeps in his mother's heart. Naptime is eternity.
Mother's Day becomes a sad reminder and an accolade for her supreme contribution to patriotism. Or maybe it's a time to be angry and resentful — why my son or daughter? Pride crumples in a darkened room filled with pictures of a young man or woman whose potential bled out onto a foreign soil.
This imagined scenario is a relentless assault on memories of all the boo-boos she kissed and Superman Band-Aids plastered on scraped knees and dinged elbows. If only Mama could have been there to fix things, to make them better, to chase the monster away, to kiss away hurts one more time, then, maybe she, too, can stop crying.
Questions and accusations stifle remorse, but tears, like water, ever the enemy of rock, wear down resistance. Solace wrestles with acceptance, but grief takes on a presence of its own. Guided by ghosts, it is either torment or release from them.
When burying a child, remembrance is love and guilt is debilitating; however, my quantifying and simplifying a mother's loss and angst seems as unsentimental as some pot-bellied politician pontificating on Memorial Day.
How can anyone suppose a wound so deep that it bleeds concurrently with every thought of the initial one? Such trauma is personal, so much so, empathy even seems contrived.
In the middle of the night, this woman still awakens to the imagined cries of her baby, only to clutch a pillow instead. Holidays are a poignant reminder of her diminished family; her unwitting contribution to a distant conflict that ignored every mother's boundaries and snatched innocence as abruptly as the life she mourns. Her naiveté is six-feet under as well. The flag so gloriously waving in front of her home casts a shadow.
This Mother's Day, there are women embracing memories rather than their children. These mothers fully understand the costs of war and wonder if the old generals and politicians who enact them ever walk in a military cemetery and sob aloud? Do their sons and daughters wear our country's uniform and see active duty?
Do beribboned chests ever exhale and tremble at the sight of an old woman kneeling at Arlington? Her fingers lovingly touching a carved name as if it were warm and whispering back to her.
Maybe it is; maybe that's why her face is pressed against the stone so she can once again hear, "Mama, Mama."
- A Gold Star Mom from New Braunfels, Texas
Aaron and his mother, Tina - 1997
Tina's trust and faith made this tribute site possible
Honor isn't about making the right choices. It's about dealing with the consequences...
Another world, some other time
You lay your sanity on the line
Familiar faces, familiar sights
Reach back, remember with all your might...
And then you sense a change
Nothing feels the same
All your dreams are strange
Love comes walking in...
- Van Halen, 1986
Lindsey and Aaron
A baby boy is a blank check made payable to the human race...
- Barbara Christine Seifert
All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination, Imagination is the workshop of your mind, capable of turning mind energy into accomplishment and wealth...
Aaron and SSG Coady (his Drill Sergeant) on graduation day - Fort Benning, GA
Some choices we live not only once but a thousand times over, remembering them for the rest of our lives....
Transcript from the Nancy Grace show - 6/23/09
"Youth is, after all, just a moment, but it is the moment, the spark, that you always carry in your heart..."
- Raisa M. Gorbachev
Aaron in 1997
"It takes a long time to become young..."
- Pablo Picasso
Aaron on his 36 hour weekend pass during Basic Training - Fort Benning, GA
The Purple Heart is a United States military decoration awarded in the name of the President to those who have been wounded or killed while serving on or after April 5, 1917 with the U.S. military. The National Purple Heart Hall of Honor is located in New Windsor, New York.
The original idea for the Purple Heart (the Badge of Military Merit) is the oldest symbol and award that is still given to members of the U.S. military, surpassed in history only by the long obsolete Fidelity Medallion.
"Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee... calls back the lovely April of her prime..."
- William Shakespeare
"When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her children..."
- Sophia Loren
"In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed forever..."
- I Corinthians 15:52
What the eye does not admire the heart does not desire...
"Mama, Mama" is a universal cry of the dying in battle. Men maimed and broken scream for their mothers, who mercifully can't hear them. Posthumous medals for valor muffle the child and honor the warrior, but for a Gold Star Mother, ribbons and ceremony are as short-lived as the cherished remains being buried.
Without being a statistic, she, too, is a casualty of war. Heard in her strangled weeping are guttural pleas to God to ease the pain of losing a child. For this heartbroken woman, a coffin, even one draped in the American flag and carried by white-gloved Marines, is the grim totality of her forced enlistment into a war that breeched the refuge of home.
The bomb in this woman's living room is the conspicuous absence of her baby. Yes, baby, because no matter how old or how long deceased, the person for whom Taps are played only sleeps in his mother's heart. Naptime is eternity.
Mother's Day becomes a sad reminder and an accolade for her supreme contribution to patriotism. Or maybe it's a time to be angry and resentful — why my son or daughter? Pride crumples in a darkened room filled with pictures of a young man or woman whose potential bled out onto a foreign soil.
This imagined scenario is a relentless assault on memories of all the boo-boos she kissed and Superman Band-Aids plastered on scraped knees and dinged elbows. If only Mama could have been there to fix things, to make them better, to chase the monster away, to kiss away hurts one more time, then, maybe she, too, can stop crying.
Questions and accusations stifle remorse, but tears, like water, ever the enemy of rock, wear down resistance. Solace wrestles with acceptance, but grief takes on a presence of its own. Guided by ghosts, it is either torment or release from them.
When burying a child, remembrance is love and guilt is debilitating; however, my quantifying and simplifying a mother's loss and angst seems as unsentimental as some pot-bellied politician pontificating on Memorial Day.
How can anyone suppose a wound so deep that it bleeds concurrently with every thought of the initial one? Such trauma is personal, so much so, empathy even seems contrived.
In the middle of the night, this woman still awakens to the imagined cries of her baby, only to clutch a pillow instead. Holidays are a poignant reminder of her diminished family; her unwitting contribution to a distant conflict that ignored every mother's boundaries and snatched innocence as abruptly as the life she mourns. Her naiveté is six-feet under as well. The flag so gloriously waving in front of her home casts a shadow.
This Mother's Day, there are women embracing memories rather than their children. These mothers fully understand the costs of war and wonder if the old generals and politicians who enact them ever walk in a military cemetery and sob aloud? Do their sons and daughters wear our country's uniform and see active duty?
Do beribboned chests ever exhale and tremble at the sight of an old woman kneeling at Arlington? Her fingers lovingly touching a carved name as if it were warm and whispering back to her.
Maybe it is; maybe that's why her face is pressed against the stone so she can once again hear, "Mama, Mama."
- A Gold Star Mom from New Braunfels, Texas
Aaron and his mother, Tina - 1997
Tina's trust and faith made this tribute site possible
Honor isn't about making the right choices. It's about dealing with the consequences...
Another world, some other time
You lay your sanity on the line
Familiar faces, familiar sights
Reach back, remember with all your might...
And then you sense a change
Nothing feels the same
All your dreams are strange
Love comes walking in...
- Van Halen, 1986
Lindsey and Aaron
A baby boy is a blank check made payable to the human race...
- Barbara Christine Seifert
All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination, Imagination is the workshop of your mind, capable of turning mind energy into accomplishment and wealth...
Aaron and SSG Coady (his Drill Sergeant) on graduation day - Fort Benning, GA
Some choices we live not only once but a thousand times over, remembering them for the rest of our lives....
Transcript from the Nancy Grace show - 6/23/09
"Youth is, after all, just a moment, but it is the moment, the spark, that you always carry in your heart..."
- Raisa M. Gorbachev
Aaron in 1997
"It takes a long time to become young..."
- Pablo Picasso
Aaron on his 36 hour weekend pass during Basic Training - Fort Benning, GA
The Purple Heart is a United States military decoration awarded in the name of the President to those who have been wounded or killed while serving on or after April 5, 1917 with the U.S. military. The National Purple Heart Hall of Honor is located in New Windsor, New York.
The original idea for the Purple Heart (the Badge of Military Merit) is the oldest symbol and award that is still given to members of the U.S. military, surpassed in history only by the long obsolete Fidelity Medallion.
"Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee... calls back the lovely April of her prime..."
- William Shakespeare
"When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her children..."
- Sophia Loren
"In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed forever..."
- I Corinthians 15:52
What the eye does not admire the heart does not desire...
"Mama, Mama" is a universal cry of the dying in battle. Men maimed and broken scream for their mothers, who mercifully can't hear them. Posthumous medals for valor muffle the child and honor the warrior, but for a Gold Star Mother, ribbons and ceremony are as short-lived as the cherished remains being buried.
Without being a statistic, she, too, is a casualty of war. Heard in her strangled weeping are guttural pleas to God to ease the pain of losing a child. For this heartbroken woman, a coffin, even one draped in the American flag and carried by white-gloved Marines, is the grim totality of her forced enlistment into a war that breeched the refuge of home.
The bomb in this woman's living room is the conspicuous absence of her baby. Yes, baby, because no matter how old or how long deceased, the person for whom Taps are played only sleeps in his mother's heart. Naptime is eternity.
Mother's Day becomes a sad reminder and an accolade for her supreme contribution to patriotism. Or maybe it's a time to be angry and resentful — why my son or daughter? Pride crumples in a darkened room filled with pictures of a young man or woman whose potential bled out onto a foreign soil.
This imagined scenario is a relentless assault on memories of all the boo-boos she kissed and Superman Band-Aids plastered on scraped knees and dinged elbows. If only Mama could have been there to fix things, to make them better, to chase the monster away, to kiss away hurts one more time, then, maybe she, too, can stop crying.
Questions and accusations stifle remorse, but tears, like water, ever the enemy of rock, wear down resistance. Solace wrestles with acceptance, but grief takes on a presence of its own. Guided by ghosts, it is either torment or release from them.
When burying a child, remembrance is love and guilt is debilitating; however, my quantifying and simplifying a mother's loss and angst seems as unsentimental as some pot-bellied politician pontificating on Memorial Day.
How can anyone suppose a wound so deep that it bleeds concurrently with every thought of the initial one? Such trauma is personal, so much so, empathy even seems contrived.
In the middle of the night, this woman still awakens to the imagined cries of her baby, only to clutch a pillow instead. Holidays are a poignant reminder of her diminished family; her unwitting contribution to a distant conflict that ignored every mother's boundaries and snatched innocence as abruptly as the life she mourns. Her naiveté is six-feet under as well. The flag so gloriously waving in front of her home casts a shadow.
This Mother's Day, there are women embracing memories rather than their children. These mothers fully understand the costs of war and wonder if the old generals and politicians who enact them ever walk in a military cemetery and sob aloud? Do their sons and daughters wear our country's uniform and see active duty?
Do beribboned chests ever exhale and tremble at the sight of an old woman kneeling at Arlington? Her fingers lovingly touching a carved name as if it were warm and whispering back to her.
Maybe it is; maybe that's why her face is pressed against the stone so she can once again hear, "Mama, Mama."
- A Gold Star Mom from New Braunfels, Texas
Aaron and his mother, Tina - 1997
Tina's trust and faith made this tribute site possible
Honor isn't about making the right choices. It's about dealing with the consequences...
Another world, some other time
You lay your sanity on the line
Familiar faces, familiar sights
Reach back, remember with all your might...
And then you sense a change
Nothing feels the same
All your dreams are strange
Love comes walking in...
- Van Halen, 1986
Lindsey and Aaron
- Barbara Christine Seifert
All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination, Imagination is the workshop of your mind, capable of turning mind energy into accomplishment and wealth...
Aaron and SSG Coady (his Drill Sergeant) on graduation day - Fort Benning, GA
Some choices we live not only once but a thousand times over, remembering them for the rest of our lives....
Transcript from the Nancy Grace show - 6/23/09
"Youth is, after all, just a moment, but it is the moment, the spark, that you always carry in your heart..."
- Raisa M. Gorbachev
Aaron in 1997
"It takes a long time to become young..."
- Pablo Picasso
Aaron on his 36 hour weekend pass during Basic Training - Fort Benning, GA
The Purple Heart is a United States military decoration awarded in the name of the President to those who have been wounded or killed while serving on or after April 5, 1917 with the U.S. military. The National Purple Heart Hall of Honor is located in New Windsor, New York.
The original idea for the Purple Heart (the Badge of Military Merit) is the oldest symbol and award that is still given to members of the U.S. military, surpassed in history only by the long obsolete Fidelity Medallion.
"Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee... calls back the lovely April of her prime..."
- William Shakespeare
"When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her children..."
- Sophia Loren
"In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed forever..."
- I Corinthians 15:52
What the eye does not admire the heart does not desire...
"Mama, Mama" is a universal cry of the dying in battle. Men maimed and broken scream for their mothers, who mercifully can't hear them. Posthumous medals for valor muffle the child and honor the warrior, but for a Gold Star Mother, ribbons and ceremony are as short-lived as the cherished remains being buried.
Without being a statistic, she, too, is a casualty of war. Heard in her strangled weeping are guttural pleas to God to ease the pain of losing a child. For this heartbroken woman, a coffin, even one draped in the American flag and carried by white-gloved Marines, is the grim totality of her forced enlistment into a war that breeched the refuge of home.
The bomb in this woman's living room is the conspicuous absence of her baby. Yes, baby, because no matter how old or how long deceased, the person for whom Taps are played only sleeps in his mother's heart. Naptime is eternity.
Mother's Day becomes a sad reminder and an accolade for her supreme contribution to patriotism. Or maybe it's a time to be angry and resentful — why my son or daughter? Pride crumples in a darkened room filled with pictures of a young man or woman whose potential bled out onto a foreign soil.
This imagined scenario is a relentless assault on memories of all the boo-boos she kissed and Superman Band-Aids plastered on scraped knees and dinged elbows. If only Mama could have been there to fix things, to make them better, to chase the monster away, to kiss away hurts one more time, then, maybe she, too, can stop crying.
Questions and accusations stifle remorse, but tears, like water, ever the enemy of rock, wear down resistance. Solace wrestles with acceptance, but grief takes on a presence of its own. Guided by ghosts, it is either torment or release from them.
When burying a child, remembrance is love and guilt is debilitating; however, my quantifying and simplifying a mother's loss and angst seems as unsentimental as some pot-bellied politician pontificating on Memorial Day.
How can anyone suppose a wound so deep that it bleeds concurrently with every thought of the initial one? Such trauma is personal, so much so, empathy even seems contrived.
In the middle of the night, this woman still awakens to the imagined cries of her baby, only to clutch a pillow instead. Holidays are a poignant reminder of her diminished family; her unwitting contribution to a distant conflict that ignored every mother's boundaries and snatched innocence as abruptly as the life she mourns. Her naiveté is six-feet under as well. The flag so gloriously waving in front of her home casts a shadow.
This Mother's Day, there are women embracing memories rather than their children. These mothers fully understand the costs of war and wonder if the old generals and politicians who enact them ever walk in a military cemetery and sob aloud? Do their sons and daughters wear our country's uniform and see active duty?
Do beribboned chests ever exhale and tremble at the sight of an old woman kneeling at Arlington? Her fingers lovingly touching a carved name as if it were warm and whispering back to her.
Maybe it is; maybe that's why her face is pressed against the stone so she can once again hear, "Mama, Mama."
- A Gold Star Mom from New Braunfels, Texas
Aaron and his mother, Tina - 1997
Tina's trust and faith made this tribute site possible
Honor isn't about making the right choices. It's about dealing with the consequences...
Another world, some other time
You lay your sanity on the line
Familiar faces, familiar sights
Reach back, remember with all your might...
And then you sense a change
Nothing feels the same
All your dreams are strange
Love comes walking in...
- Van Halen, 1986
Lindsey and Aaron
All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination, Imagination is the workshop of your mind, capable of turning mind energy into accomplishment and wealth...
Aaron and SSG Coady (his Drill Sergeant) on graduation day - Fort Benning, GA
Some choices we live not only once but a thousand times over, remembering them for the rest of our lives....
Transcript from the Nancy Grace show - 6/23/09
"Youth is, after all, just a moment, but it is the moment, the spark, that you always carry in your heart..."
- Raisa M. Gorbachev
Aaron in 1997
"It takes a long time to become young..."
- Pablo Picasso
Aaron on his 36 hour weekend pass during Basic Training - Fort Benning, GA
The Purple Heart is a United States military decoration awarded in the name of the President to those who have been wounded or killed while serving on or after April 5, 1917 with the U.S. military. The National Purple Heart Hall of Honor is located in New Windsor, New York.
The original idea for the Purple Heart (the Badge of Military Merit) is the oldest symbol and award that is still given to members of the U.S. military, surpassed in history only by the long obsolete Fidelity Medallion.
"Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee... calls back the lovely April of her prime..."
- William Shakespeare
"When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her children..."
- Sophia Loren
"In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed forever..."
- I Corinthians 15:52
What the eye does not admire the heart does not desire...
"Mama, Mama" is a universal cry of the dying in battle. Men maimed and broken scream for their mothers, who mercifully can't hear them. Posthumous medals for valor muffle the child and honor the warrior, but for a Gold Star Mother, ribbons and ceremony are as short-lived as the cherished remains being buried.
Without being a statistic, she, too, is a casualty of war. Heard in her strangled weeping are guttural pleas to God to ease the pain of losing a child. For this heartbroken woman, a coffin, even one draped in the American flag and carried by white-gloved Marines, is the grim totality of her forced enlistment into a war that breeched the refuge of home.
The bomb in this woman's living room is the conspicuous absence of her baby. Yes, baby, because no matter how old or how long deceased, the person for whom Taps are played only sleeps in his mother's heart. Naptime is eternity.
Mother's Day becomes a sad reminder and an accolade for her supreme contribution to patriotism. Or maybe it's a time to be angry and resentful — why my son or daughter? Pride crumples in a darkened room filled with pictures of a young man or woman whose potential bled out onto a foreign soil.
This imagined scenario is a relentless assault on memories of all the boo-boos she kissed and Superman Band-Aids plastered on scraped knees and dinged elbows. If only Mama could have been there to fix things, to make them better, to chase the monster away, to kiss away hurts one more time, then, maybe she, too, can stop crying.
Questions and accusations stifle remorse, but tears, like water, ever the enemy of rock, wear down resistance. Solace wrestles with acceptance, but grief takes on a presence of its own. Guided by ghosts, it is either torment or release from them.
When burying a child, remembrance is love and guilt is debilitating; however, my quantifying and simplifying a mother's loss and angst seems as unsentimental as some pot-bellied politician pontificating on Memorial Day.
How can anyone suppose a wound so deep that it bleeds concurrently with every thought of the initial one? Such trauma is personal, so much so, empathy even seems contrived.
In the middle of the night, this woman still awakens to the imagined cries of her baby, only to clutch a pillow instead. Holidays are a poignant reminder of her diminished family; her unwitting contribution to a distant conflict that ignored every mother's boundaries and snatched innocence as abruptly as the life she mourns. Her naiveté is six-feet under as well. The flag so gloriously waving in front of her home casts a shadow.
This Mother's Day, there are women embracing memories rather than their children. These mothers fully understand the costs of war and wonder if the old generals and politicians who enact them ever walk in a military cemetery and sob aloud? Do their sons and daughters wear our country's uniform and see active duty?
Do beribboned chests ever exhale and tremble at the sight of an old woman kneeling at Arlington? Her fingers lovingly touching a carved name as if it were warm and whispering back to her.
Maybe it is; maybe that's why her face is pressed against the stone so she can once again hear, "Mama, Mama."
- A Gold Star Mom from New Braunfels, Texas
Aaron and his mother, Tina - 1997
Tina's trust and faith made this tribute site possible
Honor isn't about making the right choices. It's about dealing with the consequences...
Another world, some other time
You lay your sanity on the line
Familiar faces, familiar sights
Reach back, remember with all your might...
And then you sense a change
Nothing feels the same
All your dreams are strange
Love comes walking in...
- Van Halen, 1986
Lindsey and Aaron
All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination, Imagination is the workshop of your mind, capable of turning mind energy into accomplishment and wealth...
Aaron and SSG Coady (his Drill Sergeant) on graduation day - Fort Benning, GA
Some choices we live not only once but a thousand times over, remembering them for the rest of our lives....
Transcript from the Nancy Grace show - 6/23/09
"Youth is, after all, just a moment, but it is the moment, the spark, that you always carry in your heart..."
- Raisa M. Gorbachev
Aaron in 1997
"It takes a long time to become young..."
- Pablo Picasso
Aaron on his 36 hour weekend pass during Basic Training - Fort Benning, GA
The Purple Heart is a United States military decoration awarded in the name of the President to those who have been wounded or killed while serving on or after April 5, 1917 with the U.S. military. The National Purple Heart Hall of Honor is located in New Windsor, New York.
The original idea for the Purple Heart (the Badge of Military Merit) is the oldest symbol and award that is still given to members of the U.S. military, surpassed in history only by the long obsolete Fidelity Medallion.
"Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee... calls back the lovely April of her prime..."
- William Shakespeare
"When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her children..."
- Sophia Loren
"In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed forever..."
- I Corinthians 15:52
What the eye does not admire the heart does not desire...
"Mama, Mama" is a universal cry of the dying in battle. Men maimed and broken scream for their mothers, who mercifully can't hear them. Posthumous medals for valor muffle the child and honor the warrior, but for a Gold Star Mother, ribbons and ceremony are as short-lived as the cherished remains being buried.
Without being a statistic, she, too, is a casualty of war. Heard in her strangled weeping are guttural pleas to God to ease the pain of losing a child. For this heartbroken woman, a coffin, even one draped in the American flag and carried by white-gloved Marines, is the grim totality of her forced enlistment into a war that breeched the refuge of home.
The bomb in this woman's living room is the conspicuous absence of her baby. Yes, baby, because no matter how old or how long deceased, the person for whom Taps are played only sleeps in his mother's heart. Naptime is eternity.
Mother's Day becomes a sad reminder and an accolade for her supreme contribution to patriotism. Or maybe it's a time to be angry and resentful — why my son or daughter? Pride crumples in a darkened room filled with pictures of a young man or woman whose potential bled out onto a foreign soil.
This imagined scenario is a relentless assault on memories of all the boo-boos she kissed and Superman Band-Aids plastered on scraped knees and dinged elbows. If only Mama could have been there to fix things, to make them better, to chase the monster away, to kiss away hurts one more time, then, maybe she, too, can stop crying.
Questions and accusations stifle remorse, but tears, like water, ever the enemy of rock, wear down resistance. Solace wrestles with acceptance, but grief takes on a presence of its own. Guided by ghosts, it is either torment or release from them.
When burying a child, remembrance is love and guilt is debilitating; however, my quantifying and simplifying a mother's loss and angst seems as unsentimental as some pot-bellied politician pontificating on Memorial Day.
How can anyone suppose a wound so deep that it bleeds concurrently with every thought of the initial one? Such trauma is personal, so much so, empathy even seems contrived.
In the middle of the night, this woman still awakens to the imagined cries of her baby, only to clutch a pillow instead. Holidays are a poignant reminder of her diminished family; her unwitting contribution to a distant conflict that ignored every mother's boundaries and snatched innocence as abruptly as the life she mourns. Her naiveté is six-feet under as well. The flag so gloriously waving in front of her home casts a shadow.
This Mother's Day, there are women embracing memories rather than their children. These mothers fully understand the costs of war and wonder if the old generals and politicians who enact them ever walk in a military cemetery and sob aloud? Do their sons and daughters wear our country's uniform and see active duty?
Do beribboned chests ever exhale and tremble at the sight of an old woman kneeling at Arlington? Her fingers lovingly touching a carved name as if it were warm and whispering back to her.
Maybe it is; maybe that's why her face is pressed against the stone so she can once again hear, "Mama, Mama."
- A Gold Star Mom from New Braunfels, Texas
Aaron and his mother, Tina - 1997
Tina's trust and faith made this tribute site possible
Honor isn't about making the right choices. It's about dealing with the consequences...
Another world, some other time
You lay your sanity on the line
Familiar faces, familiar sights
Reach back, remember with all your might...
And then you sense a change
Nothing feels the same
All your dreams are strange
Love comes walking in...
- Van Halen, 1986
Lindsey and Aaron
Some choices we live not only once but a thousand times over, remembering them for the rest of our lives....
Transcript from the Nancy Grace show - 6/23/09
"Youth is, after all, just a moment, but it is the moment, the spark, that you always carry in your heart..."
- Raisa M. Gorbachev
Aaron in 1997
"It takes a long time to become young..."
- Pablo Picasso
Aaron on his 36 hour weekend pass during Basic Training - Fort Benning, GA
The Purple Heart is a United States military decoration awarded in the name of the President to those who have been wounded or killed while serving on or after April 5, 1917 with the U.S. military. The National Purple Heart Hall of Honor is located in New Windsor, New York.
The original idea for the Purple Heart (the Badge of Military Merit) is the oldest symbol and award that is still given to members of the U.S. military, surpassed in history only by the long obsolete Fidelity Medallion.
"Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee... calls back the lovely April of her prime..."
- William Shakespeare
"When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her children..."
- Sophia Loren
"In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed forever..."
- I Corinthians 15:52
What the eye does not admire the heart does not desire...
"Mama, Mama" is a universal cry of the dying in battle. Men maimed and broken scream for their mothers, who mercifully can't hear them. Posthumous medals for valor muffle the child and honor the warrior, but for a Gold Star Mother, ribbons and ceremony are as short-lived as the cherished remains being buried.
Without being a statistic, she, too, is a casualty of war. Heard in her strangled weeping are guttural pleas to God to ease the pain of losing a child. For this heartbroken woman, a coffin, even one draped in the American flag and carried by white-gloved Marines, is the grim totality of her forced enlistment into a war that breeched the refuge of home.
The bomb in this woman's living room is the conspicuous absence of her baby. Yes, baby, because no matter how old or how long deceased, the person for whom Taps are played only sleeps in his mother's heart. Naptime is eternity.
Mother's Day becomes a sad reminder and an accolade for her supreme contribution to patriotism. Or maybe it's a time to be angry and resentful — why my son or daughter? Pride crumples in a darkened room filled with pictures of a young man or woman whose potential bled out onto a foreign soil.
This imagined scenario is a relentless assault on memories of all the boo-boos she kissed and Superman Band-Aids plastered on scraped knees and dinged elbows. If only Mama could have been there to fix things, to make them better, to chase the monster away, to kiss away hurts one more time, then, maybe she, too, can stop crying.
Questions and accusations stifle remorse, but tears, like water, ever the enemy of rock, wear down resistance. Solace wrestles with acceptance, but grief takes on a presence of its own. Guided by ghosts, it is either torment or release from them.
When burying a child, remembrance is love and guilt is debilitating; however, my quantifying and simplifying a mother's loss and angst seems as unsentimental as some pot-bellied politician pontificating on Memorial Day.
How can anyone suppose a wound so deep that it bleeds concurrently with every thought of the initial one? Such trauma is personal, so much so, empathy even seems contrived.
In the middle of the night, this woman still awakens to the imagined cries of her baby, only to clutch a pillow instead. Holidays are a poignant reminder of her diminished family; her unwitting contribution to a distant conflict that ignored every mother's boundaries and snatched innocence as abruptly as the life she mourns. Her naiveté is six-feet under as well. The flag so gloriously waving in front of her home casts a shadow.
This Mother's Day, there are women embracing memories rather than their children. These mothers fully understand the costs of war and wonder if the old generals and politicians who enact them ever walk in a military cemetery and sob aloud? Do their sons and daughters wear our country's uniform and see active duty?
Do beribboned chests ever exhale and tremble at the sight of an old woman kneeling at Arlington? Her fingers lovingly touching a carved name as if it were warm and whispering back to her.
Maybe it is; maybe that's why her face is pressed against the stone so she can once again hear, "Mama, Mama."
- A Gold Star Mom from New Braunfels, Texas
Aaron and his mother, Tina - 1997
Tina's trust and faith made this tribute site possible
Honor isn't about making the right choices. It's about dealing with the consequences...
Another world, some other time
You lay your sanity on the line
Familiar faces, familiar sights
Reach back, remember with all your might...
And then you sense a change
Nothing feels the same
All your dreams are strange
Love comes walking in...
- Van Halen, 1986
Lindsey and Aaron
Some choices we live not only once but a thousand times over, remembering them for the rest of our lives....
Transcript from the Nancy Grace show - 6/23/09
"Youth is, after all, just a moment, but it is the moment, the spark, that you always carry in your heart..."
- Raisa M. Gorbachev
Aaron in 1997
"It takes a long time to become young..."
- Pablo Picasso
Aaron on his 36 hour weekend pass during Basic Training - Fort Benning, GA
The Purple Heart is a United States military decoration awarded in the name of the President to those who have been wounded or killed while serving on or after April 5, 1917 with the U.S. military. The National Purple Heart Hall of Honor is located in New Windsor, New York.
The original idea for the Purple Heart (the Badge of Military Merit) is the oldest symbol and award that is still given to members of the U.S. military, surpassed in history only by the long obsolete Fidelity Medallion.
"Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee... calls back the lovely April of her prime..."
- William Shakespeare
"When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her children..."
- Sophia Loren
"In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed forever..."
- I Corinthians 15:52
What the eye does not admire the heart does not desire...
"Mama, Mama" is a universal cry of the dying in battle. Men maimed and broken scream for their mothers, who mercifully can't hear them. Posthumous medals for valor muffle the child and honor the warrior, but for a Gold Star Mother, ribbons and ceremony are as short-lived as the cherished remains being buried.
Without being a statistic, she, too, is a casualty of war. Heard in her strangled weeping are guttural pleas to God to ease the pain of losing a child. For this heartbroken woman, a coffin, even one draped in the American flag and carried by white-gloved Marines, is the grim totality of her forced enlistment into a war that breeched the refuge of home.
The bomb in this woman's living room is the conspicuous absence of her baby. Yes, baby, because no matter how old or how long deceased, the person for whom Taps are played only sleeps in his mother's heart. Naptime is eternity.
Mother's Day becomes a sad reminder and an accolade for her supreme contribution to patriotism. Or maybe it's a time to be angry and resentful — why my son or daughter? Pride crumples in a darkened room filled with pictures of a young man or woman whose potential bled out onto a foreign soil.
This imagined scenario is a relentless assault on memories of all the boo-boos she kissed and Superman Band-Aids plastered on scraped knees and dinged elbows. If only Mama could have been there to fix things, to make them better, to chase the monster away, to kiss away hurts one more time, then, maybe she, too, can stop crying.
Questions and accusations stifle remorse, but tears, like water, ever the enemy of rock, wear down resistance. Solace wrestles with acceptance, but grief takes on a presence of its own. Guided by ghosts, it is either torment or release from them.
When burying a child, remembrance is love and guilt is debilitating; however, my quantifying and simplifying a mother's loss and angst seems as unsentimental as some pot-bellied politician pontificating on Memorial Day.
How can anyone suppose a wound so deep that it bleeds concurrently with every thought of the initial one? Such trauma is personal, so much so, empathy even seems contrived.
In the middle of the night, this woman still awakens to the imagined cries of her baby, only to clutch a pillow instead. Holidays are a poignant reminder of her diminished family; her unwitting contribution to a distant conflict that ignored every mother's boundaries and snatched innocence as abruptly as the life she mourns. Her naiveté is six-feet under as well. The flag so gloriously waving in front of her home casts a shadow.
This Mother's Day, there are women embracing memories rather than their children. These mothers fully understand the costs of war and wonder if the old generals and politicians who enact them ever walk in a military cemetery and sob aloud? Do their sons and daughters wear our country's uniform and see active duty?
Do beribboned chests ever exhale and tremble at the sight of an old woman kneeling at Arlington? Her fingers lovingly touching a carved name as if it were warm and whispering back to her.
Maybe it is; maybe that's why her face is pressed against the stone so she can once again hear, "Mama, Mama."
- A Gold Star Mom from New Braunfels, Texas
Aaron and his mother, Tina - 1997
Tina's trust and faith made this tribute site possible
Honor isn't about making the right choices. It's about dealing with the consequences...
Another world, some other time
You lay your sanity on the line
Familiar faces, familiar sights
Reach back, remember with all your might...
And then you sense a change
Nothing feels the same
All your dreams are strange
Love comes walking in...
- Van Halen, 1986
Lindsey and Aaron
Transcript from the Nancy Grace show - 6/23/09
"Youth is, after all, just a moment, but it is the moment, the spark, that you always carry in your heart..."
- Raisa M. Gorbachev
Aaron in 1997
"It takes a long time to become young..."
- Pablo Picasso
Aaron on his 36 hour weekend pass during Basic Training - Fort Benning, GA
The Purple Heart is a United States military decoration awarded in the name of the President to those who have been wounded or killed while serving on or after April 5, 1917 with the U.S. military. The National Purple Heart Hall of Honor is located in New Windsor, New York.
The original idea for the Purple Heart (the Badge of Military Merit) is the oldest symbol and award that is still given to members of the U.S. military, surpassed in history only by the long obsolete Fidelity Medallion.
"Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee... calls back the lovely April of her prime..."
- William Shakespeare
"When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her children..."
- Sophia Loren
"In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed forever..."
- I Corinthians 15:52
What the eye does not admire the heart does not desire...
"Mama, Mama" is a universal cry of the dying in battle. Men maimed and broken scream for their mothers, who mercifully can't hear them. Posthumous medals for valor muffle the child and honor the warrior, but for a Gold Star Mother, ribbons and ceremony are as short-lived as the cherished remains being buried.
Without being a statistic, she, too, is a casualty of war. Heard in her strangled weeping are guttural pleas to God to ease the pain of losing a child. For this heartbroken woman, a coffin, even one draped in the American flag and carried by white-gloved Marines, is the grim totality of her forced enlistment into a war that breeched the refuge of home.
The bomb in this woman's living room is the conspicuous absence of her baby. Yes, baby, because no matter how old or how long deceased, the person for whom Taps are played only sleeps in his mother's heart. Naptime is eternity.
Mother's Day becomes a sad reminder and an accolade for her supreme contribution to patriotism. Or maybe it's a time to be angry and resentful — why my son or daughter? Pride crumples in a darkened room filled with pictures of a young man or woman whose potential bled out onto a foreign soil.
This imagined scenario is a relentless assault on memories of all the boo-boos she kissed and Superman Band-Aids plastered on scraped knees and dinged elbows. If only Mama could have been there to fix things, to make them better, to chase the monster away, to kiss away hurts one more time, then, maybe she, too, can stop crying.
Questions and accusations stifle remorse, but tears, like water, ever the enemy of rock, wear down resistance. Solace wrestles with acceptance, but grief takes on a presence of its own. Guided by ghosts, it is either torment or release from them.
When burying a child, remembrance is love and guilt is debilitating; however, my quantifying and simplifying a mother's loss and angst seems as unsentimental as some pot-bellied politician pontificating on Memorial Day.
How can anyone suppose a wound so deep that it bleeds concurrently with every thought of the initial one? Such trauma is personal, so much so, empathy even seems contrived.
In the middle of the night, this woman still awakens to the imagined cries of her baby, only to clutch a pillow instead. Holidays are a poignant reminder of her diminished family; her unwitting contribution to a distant conflict that ignored every mother's boundaries and snatched innocence as abruptly as the life she mourns. Her naiveté is six-feet under as well. The flag so gloriously waving in front of her home casts a shadow.
This Mother's Day, there are women embracing memories rather than their children. These mothers fully understand the costs of war and wonder if the old generals and politicians who enact them ever walk in a military cemetery and sob aloud? Do their sons and daughters wear our country's uniform and see active duty?
Do beribboned chests ever exhale and tremble at the sight of an old woman kneeling at Arlington? Her fingers lovingly touching a carved name as if it were warm and whispering back to her.
Maybe it is; maybe that's why her face is pressed against the stone so she can once again hear, "Mama, Mama."
- A Gold Star Mom from New Braunfels, Texas
Aaron and his mother, Tina - 1997
Tina's trust and faith made this tribute site possible
Honor isn't about making the right choices. It's about dealing with the consequences...
Another world, some other time
You lay your sanity on the line
Familiar faces, familiar sights
Reach back, remember with all your might...
And then you sense a change
Nothing feels the same
All your dreams are strange
Love comes walking in...
- Van Halen, 1986
Lindsey and Aaron
"Youth is, after all, just a moment, but it is the moment, the spark, that you always carry in your heart..."
- Raisa M. Gorbachev
Aaron in 1997
"It takes a long time to become young..."
- Pablo Picasso
Aaron on his 36 hour weekend pass during Basic Training - Fort Benning, GA
The Purple Heart is a United States military decoration awarded in the name of the President to those who have been wounded or killed while serving on or after April 5, 1917 with the U.S. military. The National Purple Heart Hall of Honor is located in New Windsor, New York.
The original idea for the Purple Heart (the Badge of Military Merit) is the oldest symbol and award that is still given to members of the U.S. military, surpassed in history only by the long obsolete Fidelity Medallion.
"Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee... calls back the lovely April of her prime..."
- William Shakespeare
"When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her children..."
- Sophia Loren
"In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed forever..."
- I Corinthians 15:52
What the eye does not admire the heart does not desire...
"Mama, Mama" is a universal cry of the dying in battle. Men maimed and broken scream for their mothers, who mercifully can't hear them. Posthumous medals for valor muffle the child and honor the warrior, but for a Gold Star Mother, ribbons and ceremony are as short-lived as the cherished remains being buried.
Without being a statistic, she, too, is a casualty of war. Heard in her strangled weeping are guttural pleas to God to ease the pain of losing a child. For this heartbroken woman, a coffin, even one draped in the American flag and carried by white-gloved Marines, is the grim totality of her forced enlistment into a war that breeched the refuge of home.
The bomb in this woman's living room is the conspicuous absence of her baby. Yes, baby, because no matter how old or how long deceased, the person for whom Taps are played only sleeps in his mother's heart. Naptime is eternity.
Mother's Day becomes a sad reminder and an accolade for her supreme contribution to patriotism. Or maybe it's a time to be angry and resentful — why my son or daughter? Pride crumples in a darkened room filled with pictures of a young man or woman whose potential bled out onto a foreign soil.
This imagined scenario is a relentless assault on memories of all the boo-boos she kissed and Superman Band-Aids plastered on scraped knees and dinged elbows. If only Mama could have been there to fix things, to make them better, to chase the monster away, to kiss away hurts one more time, then, maybe she, too, can stop crying.
Questions and accusations stifle remorse, but tears, like water, ever the enemy of rock, wear down resistance. Solace wrestles with acceptance, but grief takes on a presence of its own. Guided by ghosts, it is either torment or release from them.
When burying a child, remembrance is love and guilt is debilitating; however, my quantifying and simplifying a mother's loss and angst seems as unsentimental as some pot-bellied politician pontificating on Memorial Day.
How can anyone suppose a wound so deep that it bleeds concurrently with every thought of the initial one? Such trauma is personal, so much so, empathy even seems contrived.
In the middle of the night, this woman still awakens to the imagined cries of her baby, only to clutch a pillow instead. Holidays are a poignant reminder of her diminished family; her unwitting contribution to a distant conflict that ignored every mother's boundaries and snatched innocence as abruptly as the life she mourns. Her naiveté is six-feet under as well. The flag so gloriously waving in front of her home casts a shadow.
This Mother's Day, there are women embracing memories rather than their children. These mothers fully understand the costs of war and wonder if the old generals and politicians who enact them ever walk in a military cemetery and sob aloud? Do their sons and daughters wear our country's uniform and see active duty?
Do beribboned chests ever exhale and tremble at the sight of an old woman kneeling at Arlington? Her fingers lovingly touching a carved name as if it were warm and whispering back to her.
Maybe it is; maybe that's why her face is pressed against the stone so she can once again hear, "Mama, Mama."
- A Gold Star Mom from New Braunfels, Texas
Aaron and his mother, Tina - 1997
Tina's trust and faith made this tribute site possible
Honor isn't about making the right choices. It's about dealing with the consequences...
Another world, some other time
You lay your sanity on the line
Familiar faces, familiar sights
Reach back, remember with all your might...
And then you sense a change
Nothing feels the same
All your dreams are strange
Love comes walking in...
- Van Halen, 1986
Lindsey and Aaron
"Youth is, after all, just a moment, but it is the moment, the spark, that you always carry in your heart..."
- Raisa M. Gorbachev
Aaron in 1997
"It takes a long time to become young..."
- Pablo Picasso
Aaron on his 36 hour weekend pass during Basic Training - Fort Benning, GA
The Purple Heart is a United States military decoration awarded in the name of the President to those who have been wounded or killed while serving on or after April 5, 1917 with the U.S. military. The National Purple Heart Hall of Honor is located in New Windsor, New York.
The original idea for the Purple Heart (the Badge of Military Merit) is the oldest symbol and award that is still given to members of the U.S. military, surpassed in history only by the long obsolete Fidelity Medallion.
"Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee... calls back the lovely April of her prime..."
- William Shakespeare
"When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her children..."
- Sophia Loren
"In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed forever..."
- I Corinthians 15:52
What the eye does not admire the heart does not desire...
"Mama, Mama" is a universal cry of the dying in battle. Men maimed and broken scream for their mothers, who mercifully can't hear them. Posthumous medals for valor muffle the child and honor the warrior, but for a Gold Star Mother, ribbons and ceremony are as short-lived as the cherished remains being buried.
Without being a statistic, she, too, is a casualty of war. Heard in her strangled weeping are guttural pleas to God to ease the pain of losing a child. For this heartbroken woman, a coffin, even one draped in the American flag and carried by white-gloved Marines, is the grim totality of her forced enlistment into a war that breeched the refuge of home.
The bomb in this woman's living room is the conspicuous absence of her baby. Yes, baby, because no matter how old or how long deceased, the person for whom Taps are played only sleeps in his mother's heart. Naptime is eternity.
Mother's Day becomes a sad reminder and an accolade for her supreme contribution to patriotism. Or maybe it's a time to be angry and resentful — why my son or daughter? Pride crumples in a darkened room filled with pictures of a young man or woman whose potential bled out onto a foreign soil.
This imagined scenario is a relentless assault on memories of all the boo-boos she kissed and Superman Band-Aids plastered on scraped knees and dinged elbows. If only Mama could have been there to fix things, to make them better, to chase the monster away, to kiss away hurts one more time, then, maybe she, too, can stop crying.
Questions and accusations stifle remorse, but tears, like water, ever the enemy of rock, wear down resistance. Solace wrestles with acceptance, but grief takes on a presence of its own. Guided by ghosts, it is either torment or release from them.
When burying a child, remembrance is love and guilt is debilitating; however, my quantifying and simplifying a mother's loss and angst seems as unsentimental as some pot-bellied politician pontificating on Memorial Day.
How can anyone suppose a wound so deep that it bleeds concurrently with every thought of the initial one? Such trauma is personal, so much so, empathy even seems contrived.
In the middle of the night, this woman still awakens to the imagined cries of her baby, only to clutch a pillow instead. Holidays are a poignant reminder of her diminished family; her unwitting contribution to a distant conflict that ignored every mother's boundaries and snatched innocence as abruptly as the life she mourns. Her naiveté is six-feet under as well. The flag so gloriously waving in front of her home casts a shadow.
This Mother's Day, there are women embracing memories rather than their children. These mothers fully understand the costs of war and wonder if the old generals and politicians who enact them ever walk in a military cemetery and sob aloud? Do their sons and daughters wear our country's uniform and see active duty?
Do beribboned chests ever exhale and tremble at the sight of an old woman kneeling at Arlington? Her fingers lovingly touching a carved name as if it were warm and whispering back to her.
Maybe it is; maybe that's why her face is pressed against the stone so she can once again hear, "Mama, Mama."
- A Gold Star Mom from New Braunfels, Texas
Aaron and his mother, Tina - 1997
Tina's trust and faith made this tribute site possible
Honor isn't about making the right choices. It's about dealing with the consequences...
Another world, some other time
You lay your sanity on the line
Familiar faces, familiar sights
Reach back, remember with all your might...
And then you sense a change
Nothing feels the same
All your dreams are strange
Love comes walking in...
- Van Halen, 1986
Lindsey and Aaron
"It takes a long time to become young..."
- Pablo Picasso
Aaron on his 36 hour weekend pass during Basic Training - Fort Benning, GA
The Purple Heart is a United States military decoration awarded in the name of the President to those who have been wounded or killed while serving on or after April 5, 1917 with the U.S. military. The National Purple Heart Hall of Honor is located in New Windsor, New York.
The original idea for the Purple Heart (the Badge of Military Merit) is the oldest symbol and award that is still given to members of the U.S. military, surpassed in history only by the long obsolete Fidelity Medallion.
"Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee... calls back the lovely April of her prime..."
- William Shakespeare
"When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her children..."
- Sophia Loren
"In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed forever..."
- I Corinthians 15:52
What the eye does not admire the heart does not desire...
"Mama, Mama" is a universal cry of the dying in battle. Men maimed and broken scream for their mothers, who mercifully can't hear them. Posthumous medals for valor muffle the child and honor the warrior, but for a Gold Star Mother, ribbons and ceremony are as short-lived as the cherished remains being buried.
Without being a statistic, she, too, is a casualty of war. Heard in her strangled weeping are guttural pleas to God to ease the pain of losing a child. For this heartbroken woman, a coffin, even one draped in the American flag and carried by white-gloved Marines, is the grim totality of her forced enlistment into a war that breeched the refuge of home.
The bomb in this woman's living room is the conspicuous absence of her baby. Yes, baby, because no matter how old or how long deceased, the person for whom Taps are played only sleeps in his mother's heart. Naptime is eternity.
Mother's Day becomes a sad reminder and an accolade for her supreme contribution to patriotism. Or maybe it's a time to be angry and resentful — why my son or daughter? Pride crumples in a darkened room filled with pictures of a young man or woman whose potential bled out onto a foreign soil.
This imagined scenario is a relentless assault on memories of all the boo-boos she kissed and Superman Band-Aids plastered on scraped knees and dinged elbows. If only Mama could have been there to fix things, to make them better, to chase the monster away, to kiss away hurts one more time, then, maybe she, too, can stop crying.
Questions and accusations stifle remorse, but tears, like water, ever the enemy of rock, wear down resistance. Solace wrestles with acceptance, but grief takes on a presence of its own. Guided by ghosts, it is either torment or release from them.
When burying a child, remembrance is love and guilt is debilitating; however, my quantifying and simplifying a mother's loss and angst seems as unsentimental as some pot-bellied politician pontificating on Memorial Day.
How can anyone suppose a wound so deep that it bleeds concurrently with every thought of the initial one? Such trauma is personal, so much so, empathy even seems contrived.
In the middle of the night, this woman still awakens to the imagined cries of her baby, only to clutch a pillow instead. Holidays are a poignant reminder of her diminished family; her unwitting contribution to a distant conflict that ignored every mother's boundaries and snatched innocence as abruptly as the life she mourns. Her naiveté is six-feet under as well. The flag so gloriously waving in front of her home casts a shadow.
This Mother's Day, there are women embracing memories rather than their children. These mothers fully understand the costs of war and wonder if the old generals and politicians who enact them ever walk in a military cemetery and sob aloud? Do their sons and daughters wear our country's uniform and see active duty?
Do beribboned chests ever exhale and tremble at the sight of an old woman kneeling at Arlington? Her fingers lovingly touching a carved name as if it were warm and whispering back to her.
Maybe it is; maybe that's why her face is pressed against the stone so she can once again hear, "Mama, Mama."
- A Gold Star Mom from New Braunfels, Texas
Aaron and his mother, Tina - 1997
Tina's trust and faith made this tribute site possible
Honor isn't about making the right choices. It's about dealing with the consequences...
Another world, some other time
You lay your sanity on the line
Familiar faces, familiar sights
Reach back, remember with all your might...
And then you sense a change
Nothing feels the same
All your dreams are strange
Love comes walking in...
- Van Halen, 1986
Lindsey and Aaron
"It takes a long time to become young..."
- Pablo Picasso
Aaron on his 36 hour weekend pass during Basic Training - Fort Benning, GA
The Purple Heart is a United States military decoration awarded in the name of the President to those who have been wounded or killed while serving on or after April 5, 1917 with the U.S. military. The National Purple Heart Hall of Honor is located in New Windsor, New York.
The original idea for the Purple Heart (the Badge of Military Merit) is the oldest symbol and award that is still given to members of the U.S. military, surpassed in history only by the long obsolete Fidelity Medallion.
"Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee... calls back the lovely April of her prime..."
- William Shakespeare
"When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her children..."
- Sophia Loren
"In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed forever..."
- I Corinthians 15:52
What the eye does not admire the heart does not desire...
"Mama, Mama" is a universal cry of the dying in battle. Men maimed and broken scream for their mothers, who mercifully can't hear them. Posthumous medals for valor muffle the child and honor the warrior, but for a Gold Star Mother, ribbons and ceremony are as short-lived as the cherished remains being buried.
Without being a statistic, she, too, is a casualty of war. Heard in her strangled weeping are guttural pleas to God to ease the pain of losing a child. For this heartbroken woman, a coffin, even one draped in the American flag and carried by white-gloved Marines, is the grim totality of her forced enlistment into a war that breeched the refuge of home.
The bomb in this woman's living room is the conspicuous absence of her baby. Yes, baby, because no matter how old or how long deceased, the person for whom Taps are played only sleeps in his mother's heart. Naptime is eternity.
Mother's Day becomes a sad reminder and an accolade for her supreme contribution to patriotism. Or maybe it's a time to be angry and resentful — why my son or daughter? Pride crumples in a darkened room filled with pictures of a young man or woman whose potential bled out onto a foreign soil.
This imagined scenario is a relentless assault on memories of all the boo-boos she kissed and Superman Band-Aids plastered on scraped knees and dinged elbows. If only Mama could have been there to fix things, to make them better, to chase the monster away, to kiss away hurts one more time, then, maybe she, too, can stop crying.
Questions and accusations stifle remorse, but tears, like water, ever the enemy of rock, wear down resistance. Solace wrestles with acceptance, but grief takes on a presence of its own. Guided by ghosts, it is either torment or release from them.
When burying a child, remembrance is love and guilt is debilitating; however, my quantifying and simplifying a mother's loss and angst seems as unsentimental as some pot-bellied politician pontificating on Memorial Day.
How can anyone suppose a wound so deep that it bleeds concurrently with every thought of the initial one? Such trauma is personal, so much so, empathy even seems contrived.
In the middle of the night, this woman still awakens to the imagined cries of her baby, only to clutch a pillow instead. Holidays are a poignant reminder of her diminished family; her unwitting contribution to a distant conflict that ignored every mother's boundaries and snatched innocence as abruptly as the life she mourns. Her naiveté is six-feet under as well. The flag so gloriously waving in front of her home casts a shadow.
This Mother's Day, there are women embracing memories rather than their children. These mothers fully understand the costs of war and wonder if the old generals and politicians who enact them ever walk in a military cemetery and sob aloud? Do their sons and daughters wear our country's uniform and see active duty?
Do beribboned chests ever exhale and tremble at the sight of an old woman kneeling at Arlington? Her fingers lovingly touching a carved name as if it were warm and whispering back to her.
Maybe it is; maybe that's why her face is pressed against the stone so she can once again hear, "Mama, Mama."
- A Gold Star Mom from New Braunfels, Texas
Aaron and his mother, Tina - 1997
Tina's trust and faith made this tribute site possible
Honor isn't about making the right choices. It's about dealing with the consequences...
Another world, some other time
You lay your sanity on the line
Familiar faces, familiar sights
Reach back, remember with all your might...
And then you sense a change
Nothing feels the same
All your dreams are strange
Love comes walking in...
- Van Halen, 1986
Lindsey and Aaron
- Pablo Picasso
Aaron on his 36 hour weekend pass during Basic Training - Fort Benning, GA
The Purple Heart is a United States military decoration awarded in the name of the President to those who have been wounded or killed while serving on or after April 5, 1917 with the U.S. military. The National Purple Heart Hall of Honor is located in New Windsor, New York.
The original idea for the Purple Heart (the Badge of Military Merit) is the oldest symbol and award that is still given to members of the U.S. military, surpassed in history only by the long obsolete Fidelity Medallion.
"Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee... calls back the lovely April of her prime..."
- William Shakespeare
"When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her children..."
- Sophia Loren
"In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed forever..."
- I Corinthians 15:52
What the eye does not admire the heart does not desire...
"Mama, Mama" is a universal cry of the dying in battle. Men maimed and broken scream for their mothers, who mercifully can't hear them. Posthumous medals for valor muffle the child and honor the warrior, but for a Gold Star Mother, ribbons and ceremony are as short-lived as the cherished remains being buried.
Without being a statistic, she, too, is a casualty of war. Heard in her strangled weeping are guttural pleas to God to ease the pain of losing a child. For this heartbroken woman, a coffin, even one draped in the American flag and carried by white-gloved Marines, is the grim totality of her forced enlistment into a war that breeched the refuge of home.
The bomb in this woman's living room is the conspicuous absence of her baby. Yes, baby, because no matter how old or how long deceased, the person for whom Taps are played only sleeps in his mother's heart. Naptime is eternity.
Mother's Day becomes a sad reminder and an accolade for her supreme contribution to patriotism. Or maybe it's a time to be angry and resentful — why my son or daughter? Pride crumples in a darkened room filled with pictures of a young man or woman whose potential bled out onto a foreign soil.
This imagined scenario is a relentless assault on memories of all the boo-boos she kissed and Superman Band-Aids plastered on scraped knees and dinged elbows. If only Mama could have been there to fix things, to make them better, to chase the monster away, to kiss away hurts one more time, then, maybe she, too, can stop crying.
Questions and accusations stifle remorse, but tears, like water, ever the enemy of rock, wear down resistance. Solace wrestles with acceptance, but grief takes on a presence of its own. Guided by ghosts, it is either torment or release from them.
When burying a child, remembrance is love and guilt is debilitating; however, my quantifying and simplifying a mother's loss and angst seems as unsentimental as some pot-bellied politician pontificating on Memorial Day.
How can anyone suppose a wound so deep that it bleeds concurrently with every thought of the initial one? Such trauma is personal, so much so, empathy even seems contrived.
In the middle of the night, this woman still awakens to the imagined cries of her baby, only to clutch a pillow instead. Holidays are a poignant reminder of her diminished family; her unwitting contribution to a distant conflict that ignored every mother's boundaries and snatched innocence as abruptly as the life she mourns. Her naiveté is six-feet under as well. The flag so gloriously waving in front of her home casts a shadow.
This Mother's Day, there are women embracing memories rather than their children. These mothers fully understand the costs of war and wonder if the old generals and politicians who enact them ever walk in a military cemetery and sob aloud? Do their sons and daughters wear our country's uniform and see active duty?
Do beribboned chests ever exhale and tremble at the sight of an old woman kneeling at Arlington? Her fingers lovingly touching a carved name as if it were warm and whispering back to her.
Maybe it is; maybe that's why her face is pressed against the stone so she can once again hear, "Mama, Mama."
- A Gold Star Mom from New Braunfels, Texas
Aaron and his mother, Tina - 1997
Tina's trust and faith made this tribute site possible
Honor isn't about making the right choices. It's about dealing with the consequences...
Another world, some other time
You lay your sanity on the line
Familiar faces, familiar sights
Reach back, remember with all your might...
And then you sense a change
Nothing feels the same
All your dreams are strange
Love comes walking in...
- Van Halen, 1986
Lindsey and Aaron
The Purple Heart is a United States military decoration awarded in the name of the President to those who have been wounded or killed while serving on or after April 5, 1917 with the U.S. military. The National Purple Heart Hall of Honor is located in New Windsor, New York.
The original idea for the Purple Heart (the Badge of Military Merit) is the oldest symbol and award that is still given to members of the U.S. military, surpassed in history only by the long obsolete Fidelity Medallion.
"Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee... calls back the lovely April of her prime..."
- William Shakespeare
"When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her children..."
- Sophia Loren
"In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed forever..."
- I Corinthians 15:52
What the eye does not admire the heart does not desire...
"Mama, Mama" is a universal cry of the dying in battle. Men maimed and broken scream for their mothers, who mercifully can't hear them. Posthumous medals for valor muffle the child and honor the warrior, but for a Gold Star Mother, ribbons and ceremony are as short-lived as the cherished remains being buried.
Without being a statistic, she, too, is a casualty of war. Heard in her strangled weeping are guttural pleas to God to ease the pain of losing a child. For this heartbroken woman, a coffin, even one draped in the American flag and carried by white-gloved Marines, is the grim totality of her forced enlistment into a war that breeched the refuge of home.
The bomb in this woman's living room is the conspicuous absence of her baby. Yes, baby, because no matter how old or how long deceased, the person for whom Taps are played only sleeps in his mother's heart. Naptime is eternity.
Mother's Day becomes a sad reminder and an accolade for her supreme contribution to patriotism. Or maybe it's a time to be angry and resentful — why my son or daughter? Pride crumples in a darkened room filled with pictures of a young man or woman whose potential bled out onto a foreign soil.
This imagined scenario is a relentless assault on memories of all the boo-boos she kissed and Superman Band-Aids plastered on scraped knees and dinged elbows. If only Mama could have been there to fix things, to make them better, to chase the monster away, to kiss away hurts one more time, then, maybe she, too, can stop crying.
Questions and accusations stifle remorse, but tears, like water, ever the enemy of rock, wear down resistance. Solace wrestles with acceptance, but grief takes on a presence of its own. Guided by ghosts, it is either torment or release from them.
When burying a child, remembrance is love and guilt is debilitating; however, my quantifying and simplifying a mother's loss and angst seems as unsentimental as some pot-bellied politician pontificating on Memorial Day.
How can anyone suppose a wound so deep that it bleeds concurrently with every thought of the initial one? Such trauma is personal, so much so, empathy even seems contrived.
In the middle of the night, this woman still awakens to the imagined cries of her baby, only to clutch a pillow instead. Holidays are a poignant reminder of her diminished family; her unwitting contribution to a distant conflict that ignored every mother's boundaries and snatched innocence as abruptly as the life she mourns. Her naiveté is six-feet under as well. The flag so gloriously waving in front of her home casts a shadow.
This Mother's Day, there are women embracing memories rather than their children. These mothers fully understand the costs of war and wonder if the old generals and politicians who enact them ever walk in a military cemetery and sob aloud? Do their sons and daughters wear our country's uniform and see active duty?
Do beribboned chests ever exhale and tremble at the sight of an old woman kneeling at Arlington? Her fingers lovingly touching a carved name as if it were warm and whispering back to her.
Maybe it is; maybe that's why her face is pressed against the stone so she can once again hear, "Mama, Mama."
- A Gold Star Mom from New Braunfels, Texas
Aaron and his mother, Tina - 1997
Tina's trust and faith made this tribute site possible
Honor isn't about making the right choices. It's about dealing with the consequences...
Another world, some other time
You lay your sanity on the line
Familiar faces, familiar sights
Reach back, remember with all your might...
And then you sense a change
Nothing feels the same
All your dreams are strange
Love comes walking in...
- Van Halen, 1986
Lindsey and Aaron
The Purple Heart is a United States military decoration awarded in the name of the President to those who have been wounded or killed while serving on or after April 5, 1917 with the U.S. military. The National Purple Heart Hall of Honor is located in New Windsor, New York.
The original idea for the Purple Heart (the Badge of Military Merit) is the oldest symbol and award that is still given to members of the U.S. military, surpassed in history only by the long obsolete Fidelity Medallion.
"Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee... calls back the lovely April of her prime..."
- William Shakespeare
"When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her children..."
- Sophia Loren
"In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed forever..."
- I Corinthians 15:52
What the eye does not admire the heart does not desire...
"Mama, Mama" is a universal cry of the dying in battle. Men maimed and broken scream for their mothers, who mercifully can't hear them. Posthumous medals for valor muffle the child and honor the warrior, but for a Gold Star Mother, ribbons and ceremony are as short-lived as the cherished remains being buried.
Without being a statistic, she, too, is a casualty of war. Heard in her strangled weeping are guttural pleas to God to ease the pain of losing a child. For this heartbroken woman, a coffin, even one draped in the American flag and carried by white-gloved Marines, is the grim totality of her forced enlistment into a war that breeched the refuge of home.
The bomb in this woman's living room is the conspicuous absence of her baby. Yes, baby, because no matter how old or how long deceased, the person for whom Taps are played only sleeps in his mother's heart. Naptime is eternity.
Mother's Day becomes a sad reminder and an accolade for her supreme contribution to patriotism. Or maybe it's a time to be angry and resentful — why my son or daughter? Pride crumples in a darkened room filled with pictures of a young man or woman whose potential bled out onto a foreign soil.
This imagined scenario is a relentless assault on memories of all the boo-boos she kissed and Superman Band-Aids plastered on scraped knees and dinged elbows. If only Mama could have been there to fix things, to make them better, to chase the monster away, to kiss away hurts one more time, then, maybe she, too, can stop crying.
Questions and accusations stifle remorse, but tears, like water, ever the enemy of rock, wear down resistance. Solace wrestles with acceptance, but grief takes on a presence of its own. Guided by ghosts, it is either torment or release from them.
When burying a child, remembrance is love and guilt is debilitating; however, my quantifying and simplifying a mother's loss and angst seems as unsentimental as some pot-bellied politician pontificating on Memorial Day.
How can anyone suppose a wound so deep that it bleeds concurrently with every thought of the initial one? Such trauma is personal, so much so, empathy even seems contrived.
In the middle of the night, this woman still awakens to the imagined cries of her baby, only to clutch a pillow instead. Holidays are a poignant reminder of her diminished family; her unwitting contribution to a distant conflict that ignored every mother's boundaries and snatched innocence as abruptly as the life she mourns. Her naiveté is six-feet under as well. The flag so gloriously waving in front of her home casts a shadow.
This Mother's Day, there are women embracing memories rather than their children. These mothers fully understand the costs of war and wonder if the old generals and politicians who enact them ever walk in a military cemetery and sob aloud? Do their sons and daughters wear our country's uniform and see active duty?
Do beribboned chests ever exhale and tremble at the sight of an old woman kneeling at Arlington? Her fingers lovingly touching a carved name as if it were warm and whispering back to her.
Maybe it is; maybe that's why her face is pressed against the stone so she can once again hear, "Mama, Mama."
- A Gold Star Mom from New Braunfels, Texas
Aaron and his mother, Tina - 1997
Tina's trust and faith made this tribute site possible
Honor isn't about making the right choices. It's about dealing with the consequences...
Another world, some other time
You lay your sanity on the line
Familiar faces, familiar sights
Reach back, remember with all your might...
And then you sense a change
Nothing feels the same
All your dreams are strange
Love comes walking in...
- Van Halen, 1986
Lindsey and Aaron
"Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee... calls back the lovely April of her prime..."
- William Shakespeare
"When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her children..."
- Sophia Loren
"In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed forever..."
- I Corinthians 15:52
What the eye does not admire the heart does not desire...
"Mama, Mama" is a universal cry of the dying in battle. Men maimed and broken scream for their mothers, who mercifully can't hear them. Posthumous medals for valor muffle the child and honor the warrior, but for a Gold Star Mother, ribbons and ceremony are as short-lived as the cherished remains being buried.
Without being a statistic, she, too, is a casualty of war. Heard in her strangled weeping are guttural pleas to God to ease the pain of losing a child. For this heartbroken woman, a coffin, even one draped in the American flag and carried by white-gloved Marines, is the grim totality of her forced enlistment into a war that breeched the refuge of home.
The bomb in this woman's living room is the conspicuous absence of her baby. Yes, baby, because no matter how old or how long deceased, the person for whom Taps are played only sleeps in his mother's heart. Naptime is eternity.
Mother's Day becomes a sad reminder and an accolade for her supreme contribution to patriotism. Or maybe it's a time to be angry and resentful — why my son or daughter? Pride crumples in a darkened room filled with pictures of a young man or woman whose potential bled out onto a foreign soil.
This imagined scenario is a relentless assault on memories of all the boo-boos she kissed and Superman Band-Aids plastered on scraped knees and dinged elbows. If only Mama could have been there to fix things, to make them better, to chase the monster away, to kiss away hurts one more time, then, maybe she, too, can stop crying.
Questions and accusations stifle remorse, but tears, like water, ever the enemy of rock, wear down resistance. Solace wrestles with acceptance, but grief takes on a presence of its own. Guided by ghosts, it is either torment or release from them.
When burying a child, remembrance is love and guilt is debilitating; however, my quantifying and simplifying a mother's loss and angst seems as unsentimental as some pot-bellied politician pontificating on Memorial Day.
How can anyone suppose a wound so deep that it bleeds concurrently with every thought of the initial one? Such trauma is personal, so much so, empathy even seems contrived.
In the middle of the night, this woman still awakens to the imagined cries of her baby, only to clutch a pillow instead. Holidays are a poignant reminder of her diminished family; her unwitting contribution to a distant conflict that ignored every mother's boundaries and snatched innocence as abruptly as the life she mourns. Her naiveté is six-feet under as well. The flag so gloriously waving in front of her home casts a shadow.
This Mother's Day, there are women embracing memories rather than their children. These mothers fully understand the costs of war and wonder if the old generals and politicians who enact them ever walk in a military cemetery and sob aloud? Do their sons and daughters wear our country's uniform and see active duty?
Do beribboned chests ever exhale and tremble at the sight of an old woman kneeling at Arlington? Her fingers lovingly touching a carved name as if it were warm and whispering back to her.
Maybe it is; maybe that's why her face is pressed against the stone so she can once again hear, "Mama, Mama."
- A Gold Star Mom from New Braunfels, Texas
Aaron and his mother, Tina - 1997
Tina's trust and faith made this tribute site possible
Honor isn't about making the right choices. It's about dealing with the consequences...
Another world, some other time
You lay your sanity on the line
Familiar faces, familiar sights
Reach back, remember with all your might...
And then you sense a change
Nothing feels the same
All your dreams are strange
Love comes walking in...
- Van Halen, 1986
Lindsey and Aaron
"Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee... calls back the lovely April of her prime..."
- William Shakespeare
"When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her children..."
- Sophia Loren
"In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed forever..."
- I Corinthians 15:52
What the eye does not admire the heart does not desire...
"Mama, Mama" is a universal cry of the dying in battle. Men maimed and broken scream for their mothers, who mercifully can't hear them. Posthumous medals for valor muffle the child and honor the warrior, but for a Gold Star Mother, ribbons and ceremony are as short-lived as the cherished remains being buried.
Without being a statistic, she, too, is a casualty of war. Heard in her strangled weeping are guttural pleas to God to ease the pain of losing a child. For this heartbroken woman, a coffin, even one draped in the American flag and carried by white-gloved Marines, is the grim totality of her forced enlistment into a war that breeched the refuge of home.
The bomb in this woman's living room is the conspicuous absence of her baby. Yes, baby, because no matter how old or how long deceased, the person for whom Taps are played only sleeps in his mother's heart. Naptime is eternity.
Mother's Day becomes a sad reminder and an accolade for her supreme contribution to patriotism. Or maybe it's a time to be angry and resentful — why my son or daughter? Pride crumples in a darkened room filled with pictures of a young man or woman whose potential bled out onto a foreign soil.
This imagined scenario is a relentless assault on memories of all the boo-boos she kissed and Superman Band-Aids plastered on scraped knees and dinged elbows. If only Mama could have been there to fix things, to make them better, to chase the monster away, to kiss away hurts one more time, then, maybe she, too, can stop crying.
Questions and accusations stifle remorse, but tears, like water, ever the enemy of rock, wear down resistance. Solace wrestles with acceptance, but grief takes on a presence of its own. Guided by ghosts, it is either torment or release from them.
When burying a child, remembrance is love and guilt is debilitating; however, my quantifying and simplifying a mother's loss and angst seems as unsentimental as some pot-bellied politician pontificating on Memorial Day.
How can anyone suppose a wound so deep that it bleeds concurrently with every thought of the initial one? Such trauma is personal, so much so, empathy even seems contrived.
In the middle of the night, this woman still awakens to the imagined cries of her baby, only to clutch a pillow instead. Holidays are a poignant reminder of her diminished family; her unwitting contribution to a distant conflict that ignored every mother's boundaries and snatched innocence as abruptly as the life she mourns. Her naiveté is six-feet under as well. The flag so gloriously waving in front of her home casts a shadow.
This Mother's Day, there are women embracing memories rather than their children. These mothers fully understand the costs of war and wonder if the old generals and politicians who enact them ever walk in a military cemetery and sob aloud? Do their sons and daughters wear our country's uniform and see active duty?
Do beribboned chests ever exhale and tremble at the sight of an old woman kneeling at Arlington? Her fingers lovingly touching a carved name as if it were warm and whispering back to her.
Maybe it is; maybe that's why her face is pressed against the stone so she can once again hear, "Mama, Mama."
- A Gold Star Mom from New Braunfels, Texas
Aaron and his mother, Tina - 1997
Tina's trust and faith made this tribute site possible
Honor isn't about making the right choices. It's about dealing with the consequences...
Another world, some other time
You lay your sanity on the line
Familiar faces, familiar sights
Reach back, remember with all your might...
And then you sense a change
Nothing feels the same
All your dreams are strange
Love comes walking in...
- Van Halen, 1986
Lindsey and Aaron
- William Shakespeare
"When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her children..."
- Sophia Loren
"In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed forever..."
- I Corinthians 15:52
What the eye does not admire the heart does not desire...
"Mama, Mama" is a universal cry of the dying in battle. Men maimed and broken scream for their mothers, who mercifully can't hear them. Posthumous medals for valor muffle the child and honor the warrior, but for a Gold Star Mother, ribbons and ceremony are as short-lived as the cherished remains being buried.
Without being a statistic, she, too, is a casualty of war. Heard in her strangled weeping are guttural pleas to God to ease the pain of losing a child. For this heartbroken woman, a coffin, even one draped in the American flag and carried by white-gloved Marines, is the grim totality of her forced enlistment into a war that breeched the refuge of home.
The bomb in this woman's living room is the conspicuous absence of her baby. Yes, baby, because no matter how old or how long deceased, the person for whom Taps are played only sleeps in his mother's heart. Naptime is eternity.
Mother's Day becomes a sad reminder and an accolade for her supreme contribution to patriotism. Or maybe it's a time to be angry and resentful — why my son or daughter? Pride crumples in a darkened room filled with pictures of a young man or woman whose potential bled out onto a foreign soil.
This imagined scenario is a relentless assault on memories of all the boo-boos she kissed and Superman Band-Aids plastered on scraped knees and dinged elbows. If only Mama could have been there to fix things, to make them better, to chase the monster away, to kiss away hurts one more time, then, maybe she, too, can stop crying.
Questions and accusations stifle remorse, but tears, like water, ever the enemy of rock, wear down resistance. Solace wrestles with acceptance, but grief takes on a presence of its own. Guided by ghosts, it is either torment or release from them.
When burying a child, remembrance is love and guilt is debilitating; however, my quantifying and simplifying a mother's loss and angst seems as unsentimental as some pot-bellied politician pontificating on Memorial Day.
How can anyone suppose a wound so deep that it bleeds concurrently with every thought of the initial one? Such trauma is personal, so much so, empathy even seems contrived.
In the middle of the night, this woman still awakens to the imagined cries of her baby, only to clutch a pillow instead. Holidays are a poignant reminder of her diminished family; her unwitting contribution to a distant conflict that ignored every mother's boundaries and snatched innocence as abruptly as the life she mourns. Her naiveté is six-feet under as well. The flag so gloriously waving in front of her home casts a shadow.
This Mother's Day, there are women embracing memories rather than their children. These mothers fully understand the costs of war and wonder if the old generals and politicians who enact them ever walk in a military cemetery and sob aloud? Do their sons and daughters wear our country's uniform and see active duty?
Do beribboned chests ever exhale and tremble at the sight of an old woman kneeling at Arlington? Her fingers lovingly touching a carved name as if it were warm and whispering back to her.
Maybe it is; maybe that's why her face is pressed against the stone so she can once again hear, "Mama, Mama."
- A Gold Star Mom from New Braunfels, Texas
Aaron and his mother, Tina - 1997
Tina's trust and faith made this tribute site possible
Honor isn't about making the right choices. It's about dealing with the consequences...
Another world, some other time
You lay your sanity on the line
Familiar faces, familiar sights
Reach back, remember with all your might...
And then you sense a change
Nothing feels the same
All your dreams are strange
Love comes walking in...
- Van Halen, 1986
Lindsey and Aaron
"In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed forever..."
- I Corinthians 15:52
What the eye does not admire the heart does not desire...
"Mama, Mama" is a universal cry of the dying in battle. Men maimed and broken scream for their mothers, who mercifully can't hear them. Posthumous medals for valor muffle the child and honor the warrior, but for a Gold Star Mother, ribbons and ceremony are as short-lived as the cherished remains being buried.
Without being a statistic, she, too, is a casualty of war. Heard in her strangled weeping are guttural pleas to God to ease the pain of losing a child. For this heartbroken woman, a coffin, even one draped in the American flag and carried by white-gloved Marines, is the grim totality of her forced enlistment into a war that breeched the refuge of home.
The bomb in this woman's living room is the conspicuous absence of her baby. Yes, baby, because no matter how old or how long deceased, the person for whom Taps are played only sleeps in his mother's heart. Naptime is eternity.
Mother's Day becomes a sad reminder and an accolade for her supreme contribution to patriotism. Or maybe it's a time to be angry and resentful — why my son or daughter? Pride crumples in a darkened room filled with pictures of a young man or woman whose potential bled out onto a foreign soil.
This imagined scenario is a relentless assault on memories of all the boo-boos she kissed and Superman Band-Aids plastered on scraped knees and dinged elbows. If only Mama could have been there to fix things, to make them better, to chase the monster away, to kiss away hurts one more time, then, maybe she, too, can stop crying.
Questions and accusations stifle remorse, but tears, like water, ever the enemy of rock, wear down resistance. Solace wrestles with acceptance, but grief takes on a presence of its own. Guided by ghosts, it is either torment or release from them.
When burying a child, remembrance is love and guilt is debilitating; however, my quantifying and simplifying a mother's loss and angst seems as unsentimental as some pot-bellied politician pontificating on Memorial Day.
How can anyone suppose a wound so deep that it bleeds concurrently with every thought of the initial one? Such trauma is personal, so much so, empathy even seems contrived.
In the middle of the night, this woman still awakens to the imagined cries of her baby, only to clutch a pillow instead. Holidays are a poignant reminder of her diminished family; her unwitting contribution to a distant conflict that ignored every mother's boundaries and snatched innocence as abruptly as the life she mourns. Her naiveté is six-feet under as well. The flag so gloriously waving in front of her home casts a shadow.
This Mother's Day, there are women embracing memories rather than their children. These mothers fully understand the costs of war and wonder if the old generals and politicians who enact them ever walk in a military cemetery and sob aloud? Do their sons and daughters wear our country's uniform and see active duty?
Do beribboned chests ever exhale and tremble at the sight of an old woman kneeling at Arlington? Her fingers lovingly touching a carved name as if it were warm and whispering back to her.
Maybe it is; maybe that's why her face is pressed against the stone so she can once again hear, "Mama, Mama."
- A Gold Star Mom from New Braunfels, Texas
Aaron and his mother, Tina - 1997
Tina's trust and faith made this tribute site possible
Honor isn't about making the right choices. It's about dealing with the consequences...
Another world, some other time
You lay your sanity on the line
Familiar faces, familiar sights
Reach back, remember with all your might...
And then you sense a change
Nothing feels the same
All your dreams are strange
Love comes walking in...
- Van Halen, 1986
Lindsey and Aaron
"In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed forever..."
- I Corinthians 15:52
What the eye does not admire the heart does not desire...
"Mama, Mama" is a universal cry of the dying in battle. Men maimed and broken scream for their mothers, who mercifully can't hear them. Posthumous medals for valor muffle the child and honor the warrior, but for a Gold Star Mother, ribbons and ceremony are as short-lived as the cherished remains being buried.
Without being a statistic, she, too, is a casualty of war. Heard in her strangled weeping are guttural pleas to God to ease the pain of losing a child. For this heartbroken woman, a coffin, even one draped in the American flag and carried by white-gloved Marines, is the grim totality of her forced enlistment into a war that breeched the refuge of home.
The bomb in this woman's living room is the conspicuous absence of her baby. Yes, baby, because no matter how old or how long deceased, the person for whom Taps are played only sleeps in his mother's heart. Naptime is eternity.
Mother's Day becomes a sad reminder and an accolade for her supreme contribution to patriotism. Or maybe it's a time to be angry and resentful — why my son or daughter? Pride crumples in a darkened room filled with pictures of a young man or woman whose potential bled out onto a foreign soil.
This imagined scenario is a relentless assault on memories of all the boo-boos she kissed and Superman Band-Aids plastered on scraped knees and dinged elbows. If only Mama could have been there to fix things, to make them better, to chase the monster away, to kiss away hurts one more time, then, maybe she, too, can stop crying.
Questions and accusations stifle remorse, but tears, like water, ever the enemy of rock, wear down resistance. Solace wrestles with acceptance, but grief takes on a presence of its own. Guided by ghosts, it is either torment or release from them.
When burying a child, remembrance is love and guilt is debilitating; however, my quantifying and simplifying a mother's loss and angst seems as unsentimental as some pot-bellied politician pontificating on Memorial Day.
How can anyone suppose a wound so deep that it bleeds concurrently with every thought of the initial one? Such trauma is personal, so much so, empathy even seems contrived.
In the middle of the night, this woman still awakens to the imagined cries of her baby, only to clutch a pillow instead. Holidays are a poignant reminder of her diminished family; her unwitting contribution to a distant conflict that ignored every mother's boundaries and snatched innocence as abruptly as the life she mourns. Her naiveté is six-feet under as well. The flag so gloriously waving in front of her home casts a shadow.
This Mother's Day, there are women embracing memories rather than their children. These mothers fully understand the costs of war and wonder if the old generals and politicians who enact them ever walk in a military cemetery and sob aloud? Do their sons and daughters wear our country's uniform and see active duty?
Do beribboned chests ever exhale and tremble at the sight of an old woman kneeling at Arlington? Her fingers lovingly touching a carved name as if it were warm and whispering back to her.
Maybe it is; maybe that's why her face is pressed against the stone so she can once again hear, "Mama, Mama."
- A Gold Star Mom from New Braunfels, Texas
Aaron and his mother, Tina - 1997
Tina's trust and faith made this tribute site possible
Honor isn't about making the right choices. It's about dealing with the consequences...
Another world, some other time
You lay your sanity on the line
Familiar faces, familiar sights
Reach back, remember with all your might...
And then you sense a change
Nothing feels the same
All your dreams are strange
Love comes walking in...
- Van Halen, 1986
Lindsey and Aaron
What the eye does not admire the heart does not desire...
"Mama, Mama" is a universal cry of the dying in battle. Men maimed and broken scream for their mothers, who mercifully can't hear them. Posthumous medals for valor muffle the child and honor the warrior, but for a Gold Star Mother, ribbons and ceremony are as short-lived as the cherished remains being buried.
Without being a statistic, she, too, is a casualty of war. Heard in her strangled weeping are guttural pleas to God to ease the pain of losing a child. For this heartbroken woman, a coffin, even one draped in the American flag and carried by white-gloved Marines, is the grim totality of her forced enlistment into a war that breeched the refuge of home.
The bomb in this woman's living room is the conspicuous absence of her baby. Yes, baby, because no matter how old or how long deceased, the person for whom Taps are played only sleeps in his mother's heart. Naptime is eternity.
Mother's Day becomes a sad reminder and an accolade for her supreme contribution to patriotism. Or maybe it's a time to be angry and resentful — why my son or daughter? Pride crumples in a darkened room filled with pictures of a young man or woman whose potential bled out onto a foreign soil.
This imagined scenario is a relentless assault on memories of all the boo-boos she kissed and Superman Band-Aids plastered on scraped knees and dinged elbows. If only Mama could have been there to fix things, to make them better, to chase the monster away, to kiss away hurts one more time, then, maybe she, too, can stop crying.
Questions and accusations stifle remorse, but tears, like water, ever the enemy of rock, wear down resistance. Solace wrestles with acceptance, but grief takes on a presence of its own. Guided by ghosts, it is either torment or release from them.
When burying a child, remembrance is love and guilt is debilitating; however, my quantifying and simplifying a mother's loss and angst seems as unsentimental as some pot-bellied politician pontificating on Memorial Day.
How can anyone suppose a wound so deep that it bleeds concurrently with every thought of the initial one? Such trauma is personal, so much so, empathy even seems contrived.
In the middle of the night, this woman still awakens to the imagined cries of her baby, only to clutch a pillow instead. Holidays are a poignant reminder of her diminished family; her unwitting contribution to a distant conflict that ignored every mother's boundaries and snatched innocence as abruptly as the life she mourns. Her naiveté is six-feet under as well. The flag so gloriously waving in front of her home casts a shadow.
This Mother's Day, there are women embracing memories rather than their children. These mothers fully understand the costs of war and wonder if the old generals and politicians who enact them ever walk in a military cemetery and sob aloud? Do their sons and daughters wear our country's uniform and see active duty?
Do beribboned chests ever exhale and tremble at the sight of an old woman kneeling at Arlington? Her fingers lovingly touching a carved name as if it were warm and whispering back to her.
Maybe it is; maybe that's why her face is pressed against the stone so she can once again hear, "Mama, Mama."
- A Gold Star Mom from New Braunfels, Texas
Aaron and his mother, Tina - 1997
Tina's trust and faith made this tribute site possible
Honor isn't about making the right choices. It's about dealing with the consequences...
Another world, some other time
You lay your sanity on the line
Familiar faces, familiar sights
Reach back, remember with all your might...
And then you sense a change
Nothing feels the same
All your dreams are strange
Love comes walking in...
- Van Halen, 1986
Lindsey and Aaron
What the eye does not admire the heart does not desire...
"Mama, Mama" is a universal cry of the dying in battle. Men maimed and broken scream for their mothers, who mercifully can't hear them. Posthumous medals for valor muffle the child and honor the warrior, but for a Gold Star Mother, ribbons and ceremony are as short-lived as the cherished remains being buried.
Without being a statistic, she, too, is a casualty of war. Heard in her strangled weeping are guttural pleas to God to ease the pain of losing a child. For this heartbroken woman, a coffin, even one draped in the American flag and carried by white-gloved Marines, is the grim totality of her forced enlistment into a war that breeched the refuge of home.
The bomb in this woman's living room is the conspicuous absence of her baby. Yes, baby, because no matter how old or how long deceased, the person for whom Taps are played only sleeps in his mother's heart. Naptime is eternity.
Mother's Day becomes a sad reminder and an accolade for her supreme contribution to patriotism. Or maybe it's a time to be angry and resentful — why my son or daughter? Pride crumples in a darkened room filled with pictures of a young man or woman whose potential bled out onto a foreign soil.
This imagined scenario is a relentless assault on memories of all the boo-boos she kissed and Superman Band-Aids plastered on scraped knees and dinged elbows. If only Mama could have been there to fix things, to make them better, to chase the monster away, to kiss away hurts one more time, then, maybe she, too, can stop crying.
Questions and accusations stifle remorse, but tears, like water, ever the enemy of rock, wear down resistance. Solace wrestles with acceptance, but grief takes on a presence of its own. Guided by ghosts, it is either torment or release from them.
When burying a child, remembrance is love and guilt is debilitating; however, my quantifying and simplifying a mother's loss and angst seems as unsentimental as some pot-bellied politician pontificating on Memorial Day.
How can anyone suppose a wound so deep that it bleeds concurrently with every thought of the initial one? Such trauma is personal, so much so, empathy even seems contrived.
In the middle of the night, this woman still awakens to the imagined cries of her baby, only to clutch a pillow instead. Holidays are a poignant reminder of her diminished family; her unwitting contribution to a distant conflict that ignored every mother's boundaries and snatched innocence as abruptly as the life she mourns. Her naiveté is six-feet under as well. The flag so gloriously waving in front of her home casts a shadow.
This Mother's Day, there are women embracing memories rather than their children. These mothers fully understand the costs of war and wonder if the old generals and politicians who enact them ever walk in a military cemetery and sob aloud? Do their sons and daughters wear our country's uniform and see active duty?
Do beribboned chests ever exhale and tremble at the sight of an old woman kneeling at Arlington? Her fingers lovingly touching a carved name as if it were warm and whispering back to her.
Maybe it is; maybe that's why her face is pressed against the stone so she can once again hear, "Mama, Mama."
- A Gold Star Mom from New Braunfels, Texas
Aaron and his mother, Tina - 1997
Tina's trust and faith made this tribute site possible
Honor isn't about making the right choices. It's about dealing with the consequences...
Another world, some other time
You lay your sanity on the line
Familiar faces, familiar sights
Reach back, remember with all your might...
And then you sense a change
Nothing feels the same
All your dreams are strange
Love comes walking in...
- Van Halen, 1986
Lindsey and Aaron
"Mama, Mama" is a universal cry of the dying in battle. Men maimed and broken scream for their mothers, who mercifully can't hear them. Posthumous medals for valor muffle the child and honor the warrior, but for a Gold Star Mother, ribbons and ceremony are as short-lived as the cherished remains being buried.
Without being a statistic, she, too, is a casualty of war. Heard in her strangled weeping are guttural pleas to God to ease the pain of losing a child. For this heartbroken woman, a coffin, even one draped in the American flag and carried by white-gloved Marines, is the grim totality of her forced enlistment into a war that breeched the refuge of home.
The bomb in this woman's living room is the conspicuous absence of her baby. Yes, baby, because no matter how old or how long deceased, the person for whom Taps are played only sleeps in his mother's heart. Naptime is eternity.
Mother's Day becomes a sad reminder and an accolade for her supreme contribution to patriotism. Or maybe it's a time to be angry and resentful — why my son or daughter? Pride crumples in a darkened room filled with pictures of a young man or woman whose potential bled out onto a foreign soil.
This imagined scenario is a relentless assault on memories of all the boo-boos she kissed and Superman Band-Aids plastered on scraped knees and dinged elbows. If only Mama could have been there to fix things, to make them better, to chase the monster away, to kiss away hurts one more time, then, maybe she, too, can stop crying.
Questions and accusations stifle remorse, but tears, like water, ever the enemy of rock, wear down resistance. Solace wrestles with acceptance, but grief takes on a presence of its own. Guided by ghosts, it is either torment or release from them.
When burying a child, remembrance is love and guilt is debilitating; however, my quantifying and simplifying a mother's loss and angst seems as unsentimental as some pot-bellied politician pontificating on Memorial Day.
How can anyone suppose a wound so deep that it bleeds concurrently with every thought of the initial one? Such trauma is personal, so much so, empathy even seems contrived.
In the middle of the night, this woman still awakens to the imagined cries of her baby, only to clutch a pillow instead. Holidays are a poignant reminder of her diminished family; her unwitting contribution to a distant conflict that ignored every mother's boundaries and snatched innocence as abruptly as the life she mourns. Her naiveté is six-feet under as well. The flag so gloriously waving in front of her home casts a shadow.
This Mother's Day, there are women embracing memories rather than their children. These mothers fully understand the costs of war and wonder if the old generals and politicians who enact them ever walk in a military cemetery and sob aloud? Do their sons and daughters wear our country's uniform and see active duty?
Do beribboned chests ever exhale and tremble at the sight of an old woman kneeling at Arlington? Her fingers lovingly touching a carved name as if it were warm and whispering back to her.
Maybe it is; maybe that's why her face is pressed against the stone so she can once again hear, "Mama, Mama."
- A Gold Star Mom from New Braunfels, Texas
Aaron and his mother, Tina - 1997
Tina's trust and faith made this tribute site possible
Honor isn't about making the right choices. It's about dealing with the consequences...
Another world, some other time
You lay your sanity on the line
Familiar faces, familiar sights
Reach back, remember with all your might...
And then you sense a change
Nothing feels the same
All your dreams are strange
Love comes walking in...
- Van Halen, 1986
Lindsey and Aaron
"Mama, Mama" is a universal cry of the dying in battle. Men maimed and broken scream for their mothers, who mercifully can't hear them. Posthumous medals for valor muffle the child and honor the warrior, but for a Gold Star Mother, ribbons and ceremony are as short-lived as the cherished remains being buried.
Without being a statistic, she, too, is a casualty of war. Heard in her strangled weeping are guttural pleas to God to ease the pain of losing a child. For this heartbroken woman, a coffin, even one draped in the American flag and carried by white-gloved Marines, is the grim totality of her forced enlistment into a war that breeched the refuge of home.
The bomb in this woman's living room is the conspicuous absence of her baby. Yes, baby, because no matter how old or how long deceased, the person for whom Taps are played only sleeps in his mother's heart. Naptime is eternity.
Mother's Day becomes a sad reminder and an accolade for her supreme contribution to patriotism. Or maybe it's a time to be angry and resentful — why my son or daughter? Pride crumples in a darkened room filled with pictures of a young man or woman whose potential bled out onto a foreign soil.
This imagined scenario is a relentless assault on memories of all the boo-boos she kissed and Superman Band-Aids plastered on scraped knees and dinged elbows. If only Mama could have been there to fix things, to make them better, to chase the monster away, to kiss away hurts one more time, then, maybe she, too, can stop crying.
Questions and accusations stifle remorse, but tears, like water, ever the enemy of rock, wear down resistance. Solace wrestles with acceptance, but grief takes on a presence of its own. Guided by ghosts, it is either torment or release from them.
When burying a child, remembrance is love and guilt is debilitating; however, my quantifying and simplifying a mother's loss and angst seems as unsentimental as some pot-bellied politician pontificating on Memorial Day.
How can anyone suppose a wound so deep that it bleeds concurrently with every thought of the initial one? Such trauma is personal, so much so, empathy even seems contrived.
In the middle of the night, this woman still awakens to the imagined cries of her baby, only to clutch a pillow instead. Holidays are a poignant reminder of her diminished family; her unwitting contribution to a distant conflict that ignored every mother's boundaries and snatched innocence as abruptly as the life she mourns. Her naiveté is six-feet under as well. The flag so gloriously waving in front of her home casts a shadow.
This Mother's Day, there are women embracing memories rather than their children. These mothers fully understand the costs of war and wonder if the old generals and politicians who enact them ever walk in a military cemetery and sob aloud? Do their sons and daughters wear our country's uniform and see active duty?
Do beribboned chests ever exhale and tremble at the sight of an old woman kneeling at Arlington? Her fingers lovingly touching a carved name as if it were warm and whispering back to her.
Maybe it is; maybe that's why her face is pressed against the stone so she can once again hear, "Mama, Mama."
- A Gold Star Mom from New Braunfels, Texas
Aaron and his mother, Tina - 1997
Tina's trust and faith made this tribute site possible
Honor isn't about making the right choices. It's about dealing with the consequences...
Another world, some other time
You lay your sanity on the line
Familiar faces, familiar sights
Reach back, remember with all your might...
And then you sense a change
Nothing feels the same
All your dreams are strange
Love comes walking in...
- Van Halen, 1986
Lindsey and Aaron
"Mama, Mama" is a universal cry of the dying in battle. Men maimed and broken scream for their mothers, who mercifully can't hear them. Posthumous medals for valor muffle the child and honor the warrior, but for a Gold Star Mother, ribbons and ceremony are as short-lived as the cherished remains being buried.
Without being a statistic, she, too, is a casualty of war. Heard in her strangled weeping are guttural pleas to God to ease the pain of losing a child. For this heartbroken woman, a coffin, even one draped in the American flag and carried by white-gloved Marines, is the grim totality of her forced enlistment into a war that breeched the refuge of home.
The bomb in this woman's living room is the conspicuous absence of her baby. Yes, baby, because no matter how old or how long deceased, the person for whom Taps are played only sleeps in his mother's heart. Naptime is eternity.
Mother's Day becomes a sad reminder and an accolade for her supreme contribution to patriotism. Or maybe it's a time to be angry and resentful — why my son or daughter? Pride crumples in a darkened room filled with pictures of a young man or woman whose potential bled out onto a foreign soil.
This imagined scenario is a relentless assault on memories of all the boo-boos she kissed and Superman Band-Aids plastered on scraped knees and dinged elbows. If only Mama could have been there to fix things, to make them better, to chase the monster away, to kiss away hurts one more time, then, maybe she, too, can stop crying.
Questions and accusations stifle remorse, but tears, like water, ever the enemy of rock, wear down resistance. Solace wrestles with acceptance, but grief takes on a presence of its own. Guided by ghosts, it is either torment or release from them.
When burying a child, remembrance is love and guilt is debilitating; however, my quantifying and simplifying a mother's loss and angst seems as unsentimental as some pot-bellied politician pontificating on Memorial Day.
How can anyone suppose a wound so deep that it bleeds concurrently with every thought of the initial one? Such trauma is personal, so much so, empathy even seems contrived.
In the middle of the night, this woman still awakens to the imagined cries of her baby, only to clutch a pillow instead. Holidays are a poignant reminder of her diminished family; her unwitting contribution to a distant conflict that ignored every mother's boundaries and snatched innocence as abruptly as the life she mourns. Her naiveté is six-feet under as well. The flag so gloriously waving in front of her home casts a shadow.
This Mother's Day, there are women embracing memories rather than their children. These mothers fully understand the costs of war and wonder if the old generals and politicians who enact them ever walk in a military cemetery and sob aloud? Do their sons and daughters wear our country's uniform and see active duty?
Do beribboned chests ever exhale and tremble at the sight of an old woman kneeling at Arlington? Her fingers lovingly touching a carved name as if it were warm and whispering back to her.
Maybe it is; maybe that's why her face is pressed against the stone so she can once again hear, "Mama, Mama."
- A Gold Star Mom from New Braunfels, Texas
Aaron and his mother, Tina - 1997
Tina's trust and faith made this tribute site possible
Honor isn't about making the right choices. It's about dealing with the consequences...
Another world, some other time
You lay your sanity on the line
Familiar faces, familiar sights
Reach back, remember with all your might...
And then you sense a change
Nothing feels the same
All your dreams are strange
Love comes walking in...
- Van Halen, 1986
Lindsey and Aaron
Tina's trust and faith made this tribute site possible
Honor isn't about making the right choices. It's about dealing with the consequences...
Another world, some other time
You lay your sanity on the line
Familiar faces, familiar sights
Reach back, remember with all your might...
And then you sense a change
Nothing feels the same
All your dreams are strange
Love comes walking in...
- Van Halen, 1986
Lindsey and Aaron
Honor isn't about making the right choices. It's about dealing with the consequences...
Another world, some other time
You lay your sanity on the line
Familiar faces, familiar sights
Reach back, remember with all your might...
And then you sense a change
Nothing feels the same
All your dreams are strange
Love comes walking in...
- Van Halen, 1986
Lindsey and Aaron