12 years ago, the phone call came after I had gone to sleep for the night. I didn’t watch much news, with Dh deployed I had been overwhelmed with the reports that had come from the first combat deployment since Korea.  And so I’d blocked it out, avoiding the reality of it all. My friend just wanted to know if Dh was OK.  She had assumed I had heard, but I hadn’t.  She felt terrible, it wasn’t her fault.  So I turned on the TV and stared as the talking head told me there were reports of Canadian casualties. Almost 5 months pregnant, I had no friends or family in the area, so desperate as I was I called the Regiment. I was 21 and new to everything, I didn’t know how it was supposed to work. This was new ground. War casualties. It’s like the concept caught us off guard. The family support officer took the phone and and all he could say was ‘We can confirm there are casualties but we can’t confirm who they are, because the families haven’t been notified yet.’ They brought me to the Regiment to wait for a bit, I apparently sounded a little hysterical. I’m not proud of how badly I handled the news. I came home to my empty house in the middle of the night, all I could do was wait to see if my doorbell would ring. When morning came and it hadn’t, I received a phone call confirming that Dh was OK. What I felt then was almost harder than what I had experienced the entire sleepless night. It was the guilt that follows that moment…