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Prabha Boyles wears a pendant with a likeness of her husband Aaron Robert Boyles, a U.S. Marine killed while serving in Iraq in 2004. The widow shared stories of her husband at her Fremont, Calif., home on Saturday, March 6, 2010. (Karl Mondon/Staff)

In the night quiet, Nikki Barnett sits alone on the bed, kisses her wedding ring and speaks to her husband.

She tells him how much she loves him, and about her hard day. Since Pfc. Scott Barnett was killed Jan. 28 in Iraq, every day is hard.

His name pops up first on her instant messenger "friends" list when she unfolds her laptop. Six weeks later, she still braces for a message. A soldier's gripe about the desert. A sweet word.

"He's still there, but he's never online," said Nikki, 22, of Martinez. "I saw him at the viewing, but still, it's like, nothing seemed like it could go wrong."

Debra Bridges understands. When a Stryker carrying her husband, Steven Bridges, of Tracy, plunged into a canal early in his deployment in 2003, it didn't quite register. "I had from December until October to say, 'No, they just lost him.' Or, 'It wasn't him,' " she said. "Until everyone came home and he wasn't there."

The strain on military widows lingers long after the flag is folded and the blanks fire. Public attention and support often envelops parents, who tend to be more enmeshed in their communities. Many widows seem to shoulder the loss in a more isolated way, while caring for children or moving out of military bases.

"For wives it's completely different, because the spouse experiences the loss as a complete loss of your home, and of your community and of your place in the world. You're out of the military then," said Anni Baker, a Wheaton College history professor who writes about military personnel.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are producing more of them.

Without a draft, today's soldiers tend to be older, making it more likely they'll marry. Compared with the general population, fewer enlistees enter the military married, but once enlisted they tend to marry and start families much quicker. One in four junior enlisted men and women are married, compared with 13 percent of civilian high school graduates in their age range, according to a 2002 study on America's military population. It may be more now.

With deployment orders, service members often feel pressed to make a decision about their girlfriends or boyfriends, and about benefits, say military sociologists. Having children early may also relate to deployment, although the general pattern began before the wars started, said David Segal, director of the Center for Research on Military Organization at the University of Maryland.

"It's something we've been seeing since the advent of the volunteer force. You've got a more married force than you had in World War II or Korea or Vietnam," he said. "So there are more families left behind."

Of the 46 soldiers, Marines and airmen from Alameda, Contra Costa and San Joaquin counties who have been killed in both wars, 20 left spouses, while 15 left one or more fatherless children. The average age when they were killed was 28. At his home in Hayward, 5-year-old Brandon Boyles displays the puckish smile and, when he's angry, the curled brow of the dad he never met. On the wall of the apartment hangs an oil painting of Marine Lance Cpl. Aaron Boyles, of Newark. A memorial photo book dedicated to the Marine rests on the coffee table. Brandon often flips through it.

When her husband left for Iraq in 2004, Prabha Boyles drove home and took a pregnancy test. Brandon was born 19 days after his father died in an explosion in Al Anbar province. Aaron Boyles was 24.

"Sometimes when he asks, 'Mommy, when is dad coming home?' I look at him, I don't know what to say. I just have to say, 'Daddy's in heaven; he's watching us.' But a kid does not understand that," she said. "I say, 'He's out for a job right now. He's an angel. That's his job.' He asks, 'Doesn't Daddy get a day off?' "

Prabha Boyles, 30, is among several East Bay widows who still keep message machines tucked away in their closets, with the voices of their husbands on them.

Rachel Higgins has one. Army Sgt. Andrew Higgins, of Hayward, killed in 2007 by a sniper while on a rooftop in Iraq, left her a birthday message, telling her how much he loved her. Earlier over the phone, the 28-year-old had said he worried about their marriage, whether they would grow apart when he got back.

"It's almost listening to a ghost," she said. "Sometimes it's just comforting to hear his voice and how much he loved me. It's getting a little harder to remember his own face in my own mind. It's hard to dig that back up."

Almost three years later, Higgins, now 30, finds it hard to move forward. She lost her best friend, she said, the one spurring her on when she doubted herself.

Loss unparalleled

It is a complex grief for military widows, said Joanne Steen, co-author of "Military Widow: A Survival Guide." So many were young couples, often in new marriages, ended in violent deaths far from home. "They're well trained. They're well-equipped. They're invincible. If you have a young service member in the peak of health and they have a purpose to their life, it's harder to accept the reality of that. It's not only the loved one's loss. It's a loss to society," said Steen, also a military widow.

"Military widows have significant secondary losses. They lose their spouses, they lose their place in the unit. They lose their identity. You have very few memories and a lifetime of unfulfilled dreams."

Bridges was living on base at Fort Lewis when her 33-year-old husband was killed. A neighbor across the street tried to hide a "Welcome Home" banner behind a bush so she wouldn't see it from her window. But she drove by other banners, and soon moved 20 miles away.

"It was like all communication with everybody from the Army stopped, from all my friends," she said. "It's almost like I'm their worst nightmare."

The close contact with their husbands in battle — through e-mails and phone calls — has an impact, too, later, experts say. It's the difference between a "send" button and a trip to the mail box. Last conversations can seem trivial. Relationship stress among young couples is shared more freely, and more often.

"When the last phone call was a tiff about money or something like that," said Baker, the guilt can overwhelm.

More often, widows of the war dead struggle with the distance, a need for something tangible, specific, to close the gap. Memorials by the side of the road become sacred ground after car crashes, but military survivors don't have that, Steen noted.

Lena Ahearn could visit the site of her husband's death. It's in her hometown, and it's about the last thing she wants to do.

She fell in love with the Army man from Concord with the blue eyes and wise face soon after they met at her home in Baghdad, when she was worried about the Army forcing her family out of their home, and Army Major James Ahearn was called in to decide their fate.

He brought her back, they married at a Las Vegas chapel and had a girl. Then he went on another deployment to Iraq, where a roadside bomb in Baghdad struck his vehicle in 2007.

"I'll never go back there. I don't even want to think of it, because there is where he died. I know it's not my people who killed him. What's killing me is he was killed there. It's my country. It's my street, that's how I call it," she said.

She moved away from North Carolina and the military community, and for a while lived in Texas, but moved to Arlington, Va., to be close to the national cemetery where her husband is buried. Last year she won her United States citizenship. Their daughter, Kadi, is now 4. She doesn't know much about her dad, who was 43 when he died. "She knows he's not here," said Lena, 33. Moving on to a life with another man is far from her mind, she said.

"I would be comparing that person to him. I'm trying to heal myself by myself. It's really hard," she said. "I am in the greatest place because of him. I have my job, my daughter. I have my house. It's not a great life for me. I'm still missing him. It's OK."

Pain remains

Others have found new relationships, even as they acknowledge that the feeling of loss endures.

"I've been seeing somebody else, trying to get my life back on track," said Jocelyn Milo, of Concord, whose husband, Army Spc. Avealaloleiasasaumani Milo, persuaded her to join the Army, then was shot dead in a Baghdad attack a day before she would graduate from basic training. "He helped me a lot, to not get over what happened, but to get through it. I'm still young. There's still a whole world for me."

Natalie Tollefson, too, has found a new man, unexpectedly. When her husband, Pfc. Ben Tollefson, 22, of Concord, was killed in a mortar attack on Dec. 31, 2008, their son, Mac, was 8 months old. He'll be 2 next month. Now she's planning to buy a house and will graduate from Golden Gate University in a few months.

It's a long way from the first few months, which she spent bedbound, sick in grief and losing weight, before slowly emerging.

"I struggled with the whole grieving process. Deployment is really hard for a wife at home, especially when you have kids. It feels like your marriage is falling apart when it's not really," she said. "It didn't feel like a family. The fact I was cut off from that opportunity was really difficult for me."

She said she's not much for memorials or visiting Ben's grave site. Instead, she said she tries to honor him by reaching out to Nikki Barnett.

The two young women have chatted by e-mail across a year of a war widow's grief.

It can take years, Steen said, before the search for answers gives way to something else.

"What most military survivors find is their peace, and it matters a little bit less how their loved ones died. What matters more is they wore the uniform," she said. "Reality comes in very small slices. You can go through a whole military funeral and not fully believe that what you've been through happened.

"Reality is when you take your husband's name off your cell phone."

Contact John Simerman at 925-943-8072