I have this firm conviction that death shouldn't occur in the spring. It's so inconsistent with everything that Spring represents. Life is just too beautiful to leave in the Spring.

The death of a loved one is one of the most challenging experiences we'll ever have to face.To have such a loss occur in the Spring is, in my mind, a crime.

Many of you know that my husband was killed in the spring of 1968 in the Vietnam War; I was 22 years old and 7 months pregnant. Exactly one year and one day later, my father died from a massive stroke. I was 23 then, a war widow and a fatherless child.

Thirty-one years after my father's death, my oldest brother died of colon cancer in the spring. He was 62.

And now the Spring of 2006, my 41-year old niece is watching her young husband die of prostate cancer.

When I heard about his diagnosis I got pretty angry with God.

In the far reaches of my imagination, I thought because I had grieved the loss of my husband and written a book about the process that I had somehow broken the cycle of young widows in my family.

When I was writing my book, Grief Denied A Vietnam Widow’s Story; I felt such enormous grief that I imagined I was doing the grief work for the previous generations who didn’t have the opportunity to grieve.

My paternal grandmother, Denise Laurent, was left with 6 young children when her husband died of alcoholism at the age of 59. Her only daughter, my Aunt Addie, lost her husband in the first year of her marriage. He died from blood poisoning. Aunt Addie never remarried.

I was the young widow in my generation. I raised my daughter alone and never remarried.

Any day now, the news will come that my niece is the young widow in her generation. I have a lot of advice for my niece, but I utter not a word of it. I want to tell her not to repeat the patterns of my widowhood. When denied grief hardens, it becomes impenetrable.

My niece is fortunate to have some time to come to terms with the fact that her husband is dying. My widowhood happened in a flash when two men knocked at my door with the telegram that held the bad news, "We regret to inform you that your husband, Sgt. Howard E. Querry, has been fatally wounded."

I had no time to prepare for death. My husband was in a war, but I never thought he would die. When they informed me of his death, my world started spinning out of control and remained that way for the next 25 years.

When the documentary film, The Fog of War, Lessons Learned, about Robert McNamara’s years as a Secretary of Defense came out, I wrote The Grief of War— Lessons Learned in response to seeing the film.

The Grief of War 1. Time doesn’t heal all wounds – expressing grief does. 2. Grieving will not kill you — avoiding it will. 3. Your loss keeps repeating itself until you face it. 4. Your husband’s heroism will not sustain you in your grief. 5. Being stoic is unwise – it could kill you. 6. Depression is a gift – it can wake you up if you allow it to do so. 7. Life passes even when you are not paying attention. 8. Death is not the greatest loss. The greatest loss is what dies within us when we live. (Norman Cousins) 9. People won’t want to hear your story — tell it anyway. Pauline Laurent 2006 All rights reserved.