The Day I Scared the Hell Out of a Cameraman - and Remembered Something About Myself

It had been another period of chaos in my life. I was struggling to process 4 years of turmoil- from the moment my doorbell rang and the soldiers told me my husband had been killed in Iraq, to the moment the soldier who’d signed a guilty plea smiled at me when the military acquitted him, anyway. 

There really was not an emotion or level of hell I felt like I had not experienced at that point. Grief is hard enough. Getting myself through each day was hard enough. Trying to get my four beautiful little boys through each of their days, without their dad, was harder still. Our oldest son was just 6 years old when my husband was killed. I didn’t have a clue how to be a mom on my own, how to lead young children through grief and life.

I didn’t know how to be a widow, how to process hearing people refer to my husband as “the body,” and myself as the “victim.” I did not know how to sit through years of court proceedings, agonizing testimony, or the judgement so readily passed upon me for the ways I found to survive it all.

On that particular day, I had the music on. The kids were in school, The dogs were outside. I let myself steam extra long in the shower, before I spent the rest of the day cleaning my very messy house. There was a news crew coming the next day. I was going to be interviewed again, to share my plea for help in securing the Purple Heart for my husband. 

This honor is still, to this day, denied to my husband. Lou’s death has been relegated to “Other” in categories - not KIA, not homicide. Not even accidental, which it definitely was not.

Just… “Other.” The category the military places men and women in our military who take their own lives, or who it is easier for the military to label suicide than investigate the real cause. 

“Other.”

I’m still not okay with that.

So there I was, preparing to rip open still fresh wounds on national tv, in the hopes that someone, somewhere, would see, and some version of justice would be achieved. 

But first I had to clean. My house was a total mess- four young kids, four dogs, two cats, and me…. I could not let the news crew in with the house like that, so I had blocked out several hours to clean. 

I heard my phone ring just as I turned the water off. The dogs were barking up a racket outside, too. The reporter assigned to my story was calling - I figured she was confirming our interview tomorrow, but I couldn’t hear her because my dogs were so loud.

Hastily wrapping a towel around myself, I asked her to hold on a second, and made my way downstairs to shut my dogs up. 

When I reached my kitchen, everything stopped except for my heart, which felt like it was going to pound right out through my ribs. My breath caught like a fist in my throat. There, on the threshold of my sunroom and my kitchen, was a man I’d never seen before. He was stepping into my kitchen. All my dogs were locked outside - great protectors they were, letting an intruder walk right past them and into my house. 

I was totally naked underneath that towel. I could not have been much more vulnerable. I should have been terrified. 

I was terrified. But I was also something else: 

Furious.

I was carrying so much anger. I was tired of being told I was a victim, and I was tired of feeling like a victim. I was tired of letting so many people inflict so much harm on me and my kids and, while there would be more of that in the years to come, in that moment, I remembered I am a fighter. 

Who the *** are you I snarled at the intruder, as I grabbed a knife and advanced on him. 

Did I know how to use that knife? 

Nope.

Could I outpower him? 

Nope.

Was it the smart thing to do? 

Hell no. 

But it’s what I did. And he saw something in me- the same thing the MPs had in the courtroom when I tried to advance on my husband’s killer, after he smiled at me. This intruder saw intent.

He saw rage, and understood that I posed at least some threat.

So he fled outside. And I pursued him, around the corner of my house, into the driveway- where a startled reporter sat in the news van, holding her phone.

She had not been calling to confirm our interview. She had been calling to let me know they’d arrived. 

I had gotten the days wrong. 

And I had just appeared before her, dripping wet, clad in a towel, holding a knife, as her terrified camera man fled from me. 

My dogs were all still barking. 

And we all had to figure out how to pretend the rest of the afternoon was just another normal interview. When it was finally over, the team fled again, so quickly that they forgot a microphone stand - and never bothered to come back for it. 

The interview aired, nothing changed, and life went on.

I wish I could say that moment changed everything. It didn't. I still had years of mistakes, grief and battles ahead of me. But looking back, I can see something I couldn't see then: the part of me that would eventually fight her way back was already there.

Maybe yours is, too. What have you had to fight your way back from?