A soldier returns ... and his mom hopes for meaning

The men of Roman's platoon would surely agree. For the past 12 months, their mission put them at the dark heart of the insurgency – places like Yusufiyah and Mahmudiyah, in the area known as the "triangle of death." Roadside bombs, mortar attacks, and firefights were a daily fact of life for the Second Brigade Combat team. It was a very long year.

At last the ceremony in the hangar ends, and my husband and I make our way down the bleacher stairs and into the crowd surging around the soldiers. At 6 feet, 3 inches, Roman is easier to track than most. We shuffle closer until the distance between us disappears. And when it does, I throw my arms around him, and bury my mascara-streaked face into the front of his camouflage jacket.

"Roman," I breathe. "Mom," he answers. That is all. That is everything.

In our hotel suite later, after a nice dinner at the best Mexican restaurant we could find in Clarksville, Tenn.., I take a gift-wrapped package out of my suitcase and over to the king-sized bed where Roman has stretched out. When his return from Iraq seemed imminent, I thought long and hard about a meaningful gift to mark a day like this one.

"This is for you," I say, sitting down beside him. "Me?" he teases.

He sits up, proceeds to unwrap the gift I've just handed him, then looks at me with a puzzled expression.

"It's Grandpa's bathrobe," I tell him. "After he died, Grandma asked if there was something of his I wanted to keep. I took this, and it's hung in my closet all these years. I remember my father wearing it at breakfast every morning when I was a girl. To me, it was always so him. And now, I want it to be yours. "

After all that Roman and his comrades have been through, I am sure they will struggle, as soldiers have in the past, with how to come to terms with what they have experienced. Poet Archibald MacLeish, himself a veteran of World War I, speaks to this point in a memorial poem in which fallen soldiers say to the living, "Whether our lives and our deaths were for peace and a new hope or for nothing we cannot say; it is you who must say this. We leave you our deaths. Give them their meaning." This is the lifelong task that falls to those who come home from war. It is life's challenge to the rest of us, too.

Holding his grandpa's robe in one hand, Roman draws me closer with the other. His eyes soften, and he plants a kiss on the top of my head. "Thank you, Mom," he whispers. "Thank you."

I feel the same way, Son. But on this, your first day back, I am more thankful than I can say.

• Sue Diaz is a freelance writer. She has written a series of articles for the Monitor about her son's military service.

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