Another Chaplain’s Call, Another Hurt That Won’t Go Away

She remembers it so clearly. She was 8 and ran to answer the knock on the door. She’d been making lemonade; her mother was scrubbing the kitchen floor. As a Navy brat, seeing a military man at the door -- even one with little crosses on his uniform -- didn’t startle her.

But when she summoned her mother, who fell apart at the sight of the chaplain, young Elaine Roach began to realize that her life had taken a very bad turn. Her father, Navy pilot Harold Roach, had gone down in the South China Sea on his way to a place called Vietnam. Her sobbing mother told her not to worry, that she’d take care of her. The young girl’s sense of emptiness and loss began taking hold that October day in 1964, and she never felt 100% whole again.

It wasn’t until she was 29, Roach says today, that she told another soul that she felt responsible for years for her father’s death because the last time she saw him they had argued about her not being allowed to get something at an art shop.

This is all by way of preface, to tell you that a child’s pain from losing a parent can take a long time to subside. Talking about her father’s death as she was growing up wasn’t taboo around the house, it just wasn’t done. And to the outside world that Elaine knew, just the mention of Vietnam left lots of people cold.

Young Elaine Roach is now 48, married and the owner of an indoor sign company in Anaheim. Life was rolling along until a year ago, when she got a phone call from Joel, her 20-year-old son from a previous marriage and her first-born. He told his mom, out of the blue, that he wanted to join the Army.

The words gave Roach a feeling in the pit of her stomach like she hadn’t had in a long time.

She tried to talk him out of it, not hesitating to invoke the memory of the grandfather he never knew and her own fears. Joel would have none of it. He was moved by the plight of the Iraqi people and “wanted to do something meaningful” with his life. Why should others go to war and not him, he asked his mother. Addressing her objections head-on, he said, “Is it just because I’m your son?” You bet it is, she said.

Roach comforted herself by being analytical. Maybe he wouldn’t be sent into combat. Even if he were, lightning couldn’t possibly strike her twice.

However, in mid-January of this year, after he’d been home for Christmas, Joel phoned his mother again and told her was being shipped to Iraq. “It was my worst nightmare,” she says. “My biggest fear.”

He got there in mid-January. On March 13, Joel Brattain and two others were killed when a roadside mine blew up their Army vehicle. Last week, the 21-year-old Esperanza High School graduate was buried.

And once again, Roach must walk a familiar, if desolate, path.

“Don’t I have a credit balance?” she asks, as we talk in her Yorba Linda home. It’s said without a trace of self-pity; coming across as more of a rhetorical question whose answer she knows only too well.

“I know there’s nothing I could have done, and I had to let him live his own life and make his own choices -- and I hate it,” she says. “I hate that I can’t be with him anymore.”

She rejoices that she and Joel had a tight bond and had put the spats of his teenage-years behind them.

She reads from something he wrote to her in his favorite children’s book, which he gave her on his 18th birthday. In it, he thanks her for guidance and looks forward to her presence in his adult life.

Throughout the hour or so we talk, Roach is neither angry nor morose. She’s in the grip of pain, wanting to accelerate the grieving period but knowing she can’t. “Joel knows I have to hurt,” she says.

“He understands that, but he doesn’t want me to stay there. He wants me to move on. The hurt will never go away, the loss -- and I speak from experience, there’s a hole that’ll always be there. But he would want me to have a fulfilling life. He wants everyone who knew him not to wallow.”

So, she says, she won’t.

She doesn’t disparage the military that cost her the two most important people in her life, content to say only that she’s still working through some unresolved questions.

“I used to always say growing up that, because of my dad, I learned to live life to its fullest, because you never know if you’ll be there the next day,” she says. “But this is life-changing, absolutely. Because death is real. I thought my dad had impacted my life more than anybody possibly could, but now I’d say it’s Joel. Or, maybe it’s the combination.”

She considers her son’s death heroic, just as her father’s. But, of course, she would have given anything if, two weeks ago, another chaplain hadn’t come to her home -- this time looking for Joel’s young wife, who was living with Roach, her husband and 9-year-old son, Brandon.

Roach met the chaplain in the frontyard and begged him to tell her if her son were dead or alive. He couldn’t, obliged by protocol to wait until Joel’s wife came home to give her the news first. And so Roach waited, trying to convince herself that nearly 40 years later, the fates couldn’t possibly so cruel as to send another messenger of sorrow to her front door.

“I had forgotten,” she says, softly, “that they might come.”

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821, at dana.parsons@latimes.com or at The Times’ Orange County edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626.