Still In The World

“What if you die overseas and I’m not there,” my mom said when I told her I had joined the Marines. I laughed and said that even if I were a civilian and died in the United States she most likely wouldn’t be there. Still, she worried that one day she would get a call saying that I’d been killed or was dying far from home.

My mother worried for nothing. Instead, over a decade later, I was the one who got the dreaded phone call.