Tiny reminders

Baby's smile, special blanket and last letter home keep spirit of war widow's husband alive

Jim Sheeler, Rocky Mountain News

Saturday, January 14, 2006

When she awoke in the maternity ward on Christmas morning, Katherine Cathey knew her husband would not be at her side.

Even before 2nd Lt. James J. Cathey left for Iraq last summer, she understood that he would be deployed until at least February. The day after she kissed him goodbye, Katherine created her own calendar, circling the days he might call, marking everything he would miss - birthdays, Thanksgiving, Christmas. She noted what they both considered the most important day of their lives: the birth of the baby that doctors once told them was nearly impossible.

One month after Jim Cathey left for the war, a Marine major and Navy chaplain showed up at Katherine's door. There was an explosion, they told her. He didn't make it. Since then, she's been saddled with constant reminders of his absence. For nearly five months, she had prepared herself.

Then Katherine awoke on Christmas morning, looked to the crib and, in a way, there he was.

"That cowlick - he has the same cowlick on the right side of his head," she said of James J. Cathey Jr. "He has the nose. One of his ears sticks out more than the other like his dad. He has these really long fingers and feet like Jim.

"And he smiles. He smiles a lot."

Gifts from around the world

On her handmade calendar, the 24-year-old war widow had marked all the things she had planned to send to Iraq this month: "Congrats on baby card, Baby pictures, Cigars, Candy."

The baby wasn't due until Jan. 1, but that changed during a visit to the obstetrician last month.

"They were able to get a heartbeat from him, but when they did the ultrasound, they couldn't see him moving," Katherine said.

Doctors decided to induce birth, but "his heartbeat went from 160 to 60. It was scary. All of the sudden they're saying, 'He's decelerating and we have to do a C-section.' All of the sudden there were 20 people running in and out of the room."

For the past nine months, the baby's safety was a frequent concern. Not long after Jim and Katherine married, doctors told the couple that for medical reasons it was unlikely that Katherine would ever get pregnant. After she found out they were wrong, Jim sent her a Mother's Day card early, while he was training in the desert in California.

"I can't wait, baby!" he wrote inside.

After Jim deployed, Katherine would spend hours with her hands on her belly, talking to the baby about his father. Though he would never feel the baby kick, Jim Cathey also tried to remain as close as possible.

"Jim sent me an e-mail that he had this dream that he was holding the baby, but that it was really tiny, like he was able to hold it in his hand," she said.

"The last time Jim was alive, the baby was so tiny."

Following the emergency Caesarean section, "Jimmy" Cathey was born Dec. 22 at 7 pounds, 10 ounces. After spending the first two days in the nursery, he was allowed to spend Christmas eve in Katherine's room, their first night together.

The next day, Katherine and her parents arrived back in Brighton and found presents sent from around the country and around the world. Among them, Katherine found a special gift from one of the men who served with her husband in Iraq.

"I opened the box and just started crying. It was a tricycle. I could just picture him riding it when he was older," she said, as the tears fell again. "And his dad wouldn't be there."

A last letter, with love

Since the day the Marines showed up at her door, the periodic reminders of Jim Cathey's life - and death - never seemed to end. It started in late August, the day Katherine returned from the funeral, walked to the mailbox and found a letter sent only a few days before her husband died.

She opened it - and heard his voice.

"Hey baby," the letter begins. "I want you to know that you are continuously on my mind. I know that I should be concentrating on the job I am doing here, but it is impossible for me not to wonder what you are doing every minute of every day."

Soon afterward, a care package was returned unopened. She had sent it two weeks before Jim's death. It sat on the counter for the next four months, until Katherine's mother finally asked if she could put it in a closet for safekeeping.

"It's hard to throw stuff away. Even little notes I jotted down while he was still alive; I don't want to throw them away. I'm doing my best to save everything I can. I want to go through it with Jimmy.

"I hope he asks a lot about his dad," she said. "I'm sure he will."

The last letter arrived, along with his desert camouflage uniforms, in a footlocker delivered from Iraq. At the bottom of the footlocker was the last shirt Katherine wore before Jim left for Iraq. It still smelled like her perfume.

"My Love," the letter begins,

It's been a fairly quiet week. We still continue to do good things . . . Well as of today I've been gone for exactly a month. Kind of weird, huh. I really don't think it feels like it's been that long."

Inside the living room, Katherine looked down at the baby to regain her composure. By now, she has memorized all of Jim's letters. She knew what came next.

"Have I told you how excited I am to be a daddy?" she read. "You should find out this week what we're going to have and that is flippin' amazing . . . I think I'm going to write a journal while I'm over here so that one day our kids can read it and see what their dad did."

Days before Jim Cathey died, his sister sent him a stack of photos of their time growing up together in Reno, Nev. It was where he also would be buried.

"All the pictures of me with my dad hunting and fishing made me think of how much fun it will be to do stuff like that with our family," he wrote.

Many of the same photos were printed on his funeral brochure.

As the weeks wore on, Katherine began to expect the reminders from Iraq, wondering what would arrive next.

She never expected the call that came in late September.

When she picked up the phone, she heard the voice of Maj. Steve Beck, the Marine casualty assistance calls officer who first knocked on her door and who presented her the folded U.S. flag at Jim's funeral. He was the one who later delivered Jim's footlocker and the one who helped guide her through the stacks of paperwork.

"Major Beck called the week before Jim's birthday," Katherine said. "He said, 'There's no easy way to say this. Remember how you checked the box that said you would like to be notified if more of Jim's body was found?' "

Another decision to make

Second Lt. James Cathey was killed Aug. 21 in Karmah, on the outskirts of Fallujah, when a booby-trapped door exploded as his unit searched an abandoned schoolhouse. The explosion was so powerful that it also blew off an arm and leg of the corporal who went in behind Cathey. The corporal survived.

As she spoke with Beck a little more than a month later, Katherine learned that morticians at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware had identified a leg that belonged to her husband. Though the situation is rare, the military says, it's not always possible to transport all the remains of a dead serviceman at once. Sometimes, DNA testing is required first.

It was up to Katherine to decide the next step: She could leave the leg with the mortuary affairs team in Dover, she could have it cremated, or she could have it interred with her husband's body.

"He said, 'I'll give you some time. Do what you think is right.' "

The decision didn't take long.

"I decided I'd like to have part of him here with me."

The process begins anew

For the Marines, transporting the ashes-filled urn was no different from their original mission to bring Jim Cathey's body back to his family from Iraq. An extension of the "never leave a Marine behind" mandate, a Marine was required to escort the urn each step of the way.

At Katherine's request, the Marines called upon 2nd Lt. Marcus Moyer, who trained with Jim Cathey in Quantico, Va.

"I never really looked at it as escorting a box or escorting ashes. I treated it as though he was with me," Moyer said. "I never left it alone."

As crew members on the airplane to Denver discovered the Marine's mission, they asked to shake his hand. One flight attendant wrote him a heartfelt thank- you note on a United Airlines napkin.

"As we were coming into Denver, the pilot came on the loudspeaker and announced that we had a special passenger onboard," Moyer said.

The pilot then read the information about Jim Cathey and requested that passengers remain seated until Moyer left.

"As I was walking forward, people said things. 'Oo-rah,' if they knew I was with the Marines. Or 'Thank you.' Or, 'You're our hero.' Or they would clap . . . Regardless of their feelings about the war, they all seemed very supportive. People would come up and thank me for my service. They would call me a hero."

Moyer paused for a long time, then sniffled.

"Whenever I could do it without crying, I would tell them that . . . that I wasn't the hero, but that I knew a lot of them."

That night, after Moyer met up with Beck, the Marines once again pulled up to Katherine Cathey's home, clad in their formal dress blue uniforms.

"It's another notification," Beck said. "Jim doesn't die all over again, but it's the introduction of more pain. And another whole difficult process we need to go through. And everything starts over.

"In a way, it was like walking up to that porch for the first time."

Plans for a distant reunion

The bronze, box-shaped urn is emblazoned with the Marine Corps logo. Beneath it is an inscription: "2nd Lt. James J. Cathey October 8, 1980 - August 21, 2005."

Katherine Cathey picked up the urn and sat, cross-legged, on her bed. Before he left for Iraq, the couple never talked about death.

"I remember in Lejeune (N.C.) trying to bring something up about it," Katherine said. "He just started crying and said, 'I don't want to think about it. You don't know how scared I am.' I think he had a feeling that he wasn't coming back."

When she's out in public, Katherine says she shies away from bringing up the story of her husband's death, worried mainly about making others uncomfortable.

"Everyone says the same thing: 'I don't know what to say,' " she said. "I can't imagine being on the other side of it. I don't know what I'd say, either."

She stopped and thought.

"I guess I want them to say, 'Wow, what an amazing husband you had.' "

With the birth of her son, Katherine says she soon plans to move into her own home, where there will be an area dedicated to her husband's memory. By fall, she hopes to enroll at the University of Colorado to study anthropology - the same subject Jim Cathey graduated in, with honors, a year ago.

Eventually, she says, she plans to be buried with her husband, along with his ashes.

"I kind of feel like I have part of him with me," she said. "And it may sound silly to some people, but since I've decided to have the urn buried with me, it will be like all of Jim will be back together once I am with him."

She placed the urn back on the shelf, near the baby's bassinet. On one side of the bronze box, she had inscribed a quote from one of her favorite letters.

"I am here for you even when I am not, and that's the way it will always be. Semper, Jim"

Gifts from 'grandmothers'

In November, a month before Jimmy Cathey's birth, five sets of grieving parents and one expectant mother gathered in the childhood home of Lance Cpl. Thomas Slocum.

The modest, ranch-style home in Thornton was the first place in the state where men in deep- blue uniforms visited with the news of a fallen Marine, the first place where the war in Iraq came home to Colorado.

The sun streamed through the living-room window, through a stained-glass replica of the Gold Star flag that, since World War I, has represented a loved one lost in the war.

Katherine didn't know it, but she was about to have her first baby shower.

"It's nice to see this new life," said Terry Cooper, the mother of Tommy Slocum, who was killed March 23, 2003. "She has her husband's spirit in her child."

Just as the Marines are a small, close-knit group, many of their parents also have formed a tight circle, meeting regularly, sharing stories, frustrations and tears. The group was formed last year, primarily by Jane Rund, whose son, Greg, died Dec. 11, 2004, in Fallujah.

"I just had this desire to get to know the families of the men that my son is going to spend eternity with," she said.

Before surprising Katherine with baby gifts, Terry Cooper handed her containers of sand from Iraq and Kuwait - something she's given each of the parents - "so you have a piece of where they were," she said. "It's something you can share with your son."

Then the mothers and fathers who had each lost a son quietly watched as Katherine opened baby gifts.

"Tommy used to pass out whenever we put him in the car seat," Terry Cooper said, as Katherine opened a box of car-seat toys.

"Sam used to spit up on those," said Mary Holder, whose son died on Veteran's Day 2004 in Fallujah. Soon afterward, she began to cry.

"I thought I was over this," she said.

"It doesn't matter when it happened, how long ago," Terry Cooper said.

"Sometimes it seems like yesterday, and sometimes it seems like forever ago," Mary Holder said.

Before Katherine left, Terry Cooper left her with instructions to call as soon as the baby was born.

"Include us whenever you can. You're definitely part of us," she said. "You're as much a part of this family as you want to be."

Later, as she watched from the back of the room near a photo of her son, Tommy Slocum's mother looked at Katherine and smiled.

"She has more grandmothers than she'll ever know," she said.

Comfort of an old soul

The soft green baby blanket no longer smells like 2nd Lt. James J. Cathey.

"The night before he left for Iraq, I asked him to sleep with the blanket, so that when the baby was born, he would know how his father smelled," Katherine said, holding up the blanket she knitted while her husband was stationed at Camp Lejeune, preparing to deploy.

"I can still see him there that night," she said. "He just held the blanket and slept with it. He went to sleep before I did, and I remember watching him, crying, thinking about how much I was going to miss him, and that he wasn't going to be there when the baby was born."

She then lifted the blanket, leaned into the bassinet and wrapped it around her son.

"The blanket smells more like a baby now," she said softly. "But there's something about Jimmy that also smells like his dad."

She nuzzled her nose with the infant's.

"I don't know what it is, but I feel like he's an old soul," she said, staring into his eyes as he fell asleep.

"I don't know what it is, there's just something about him that makes me think that he's already experienced a lot of life."