'Unremarried Widow' recounts how Army wife lost husband in Iraq 4 months after wedding (review)

Yvonne Zipp | By Yvonne Zipp |
on February 24, 2014 at 5:00 PM, updated February 24, 2014 at 8:36 PM

Artis Henderson and her husband, Miles, were still newlyweds when the Army pilot's Apache helicopter crashed in Iraq in 2006.

Unremarried Widow.jpg'Unremarried Widow,' by Artis Henderson, Simon & Schuster, $25, 238 pages

Just four months after getting married, the 26-year-old Henderson was reclassified by the military as "an unremarried widow."

Henderson, a journalist and essayist, takes that sterile, bureaucratic language and imbues it with all the love and loss she could pour into her remarkable new memoir.

Henderson, who grew up the daughter of a single mom, graduated from an Ivy League university and taught in France for a year. She never envisioned herself getting married at all — let alone becoming an Army wife. Then she met Miles.

In the beginning, it was an opposites attract story: She consulted psychics; he came from a church-going family. He was a soldier; she "vehemently, vocally" opposed the Iraq War.

The couple's love for each other sustained Henderson in her unfamiliar role, as she followed him to Fort Hood and Fort Bragg and worried about what was going to happen to her own career. She writes candidly about feeling isolated and out-of-place on military bases. After Miles' unit deployed, she went home to stay with her mother in Florida.

That's where two soldiers met her one evening after she got home from work. "On behalf of the president of the United States, I regret to inform you that your husband, Miles Henderson, has been killed in Iraq," one told her.

In a terrible instance of symmetry, her mother was widowed young when Henderson's father, who was also a pilot, died after his Piper Cub went down in Georgia. Henderson, 5 years old at the time, was a passenger that day when the engine failed. She survived, despite an impact so severe it crushed her spine and left an indent in her skull.

Her own grief gave Henderson a new way to view her mother's life, she writes.

The second half of the memoir is a powerful meditation on mourning.

"The military has a term for everything that comes after a traumatic incident: right of the boom," Henderson writes. "This is how I began to think of my life — right of the boom — as all the parts of military protocol fell into place."

At first, she writes, she was consumed with fury at everyone, including her mother.

"People kept giving me space, all of us hoping my grief had a half-life, but I didn't space. I needed people to say Miles's name out loud. I needed them not to flinch when I said it. I needed them to ask about him," she writes.

"The literature on mourning agrees that grief can be exhausting. Here's what's exhausting: holding yourself steady. I had to steady myself the way a person steadies a broken arm, to keep from knocking into the hurt. And still, despite my best efforts, I often bumped up against the pain."

Henderson writes about the first years after Miles's death -- the investigation into the crash, her support group (Henderson would deflect people's concern by saying she "only grieved on Tuesdays"), and her conversations with other military wives, including the widow of the pilot who died with Miles. She attends a National Military Survivors Seminar, where she is given a button with her husband's face on it.


Then Henderson begins to write, at first for the News-Press of Fort Myers and Florida Weekly and then for other publications. She moves to New York to go to journalism school at Columbia University. In fact, her memoir began as an essay in the New York Times' Modern Love column.

And eventually, while the sting of her husband's loss is still with her, Henderson starts to learn how to answer the question one widow posed as, "What next?"

During her first year of widowhood, an older widow told her, "Once you make it through the first round of important dates, you'll be disappointed to discover what follows."

"What follows?" Henderson asked.

"Another year."

By the end of the memoir, that feels like less of a curse.
