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1st PLACE - 10th ANNUAL FUNDSFORWRITERS ESSAY CONTEST - ENTRY FEE CATEGORY

Sacred Pains

by Elizabeth Heaney

Natalie cleans the tube of a small flashlight disassembled on the table in front of her, rubbing the casing with a soft, treated cloth until the metallic-blue finish shines like it’s brand new. She pushes a small bit of the cleaning cloth inside the tube to clean the inner surfaces, too – surfaces no one will ever see. Reaching for the flashlight’s tiny lens, Natalie polishes it to a sparkling brilliance. Then she picks up a q-tip and carefully swabs the threads on the flashlight, turning it around and around, intently wiping each curving ridge where the parts screw together. With her gentle attention, each and every part becomes pristine.

 When Natalie finishes cleaning the flashlight, she tenderly reassembles it, places it in a zip-loc bag, and sets it aside with other bagged belongings. She reaches for a cell phone power cord. Stretching the thin cord out to its full length, Natalie runs a cloth over it several times, making sure she gets every speck of dust or dirt off of it. She uses q-tips now to clean around the prongs and the ends. When the cord is shiny-clean, Natalie wraps it into a neat coil, secures it with a rubber band and places it into another zip-loc.  

Natalie is cleaning the personal belongings of a soldier killed in combat. For each fallen warrior, Natalie and her co-workers meticulously catalog and clean every single item in a soldier’s footlocker before shipping the belongings home to the soldier’s grieving family. T-shirts, pants, jackets and sweatshirts are laundered and sorted on a long stretch of tables. The clothes are folded, military-neat to the exact same size, then placed in crisp stacks. Socks, turned inward in uniform little bundles are laid out as if they are in formation. Books, journals, photos, letters – all are sorted, packaged into zip-locs, placed into the blessed boxes headed for home (the footlockers, too, are scrubbed inside and out before being filled). Natalie and her team treat the fallen soldiers’ possessions with the respect and reverence given to restoring a Renaissance masterpiece. Their gloved hands move slowly and deliberately, their attention focused and calm.  

I check on Natalie later in the afternoon to see what she’s working on. She’s scrubbing the bottom of a soldier’s boots with a toothbrush, sometimes using a file to get in between the hard, patterned rubber of the sole. When the sole is spotless, she rubs finishing oil into every nook and cranny, giving the rubber a smooth sheen. She washes the bootlaces, dries them and gingerly weaves them back through the holes, making sure they cross over in the same direction all the way up the boots’ front. In a small tub next to the sink, she’s soaking his Velcro name tags. She’ll start scouring those with small brushes next.

 As she leans over the sink, suds covering her hands, I ask if the job is difficult for her, if she ever feels too sad. She shakes her head at first. Then she admits: sometimes a particular case really touches her heart. She’ll find herself thinking about a soldier for weeks after the belongings have been sent off.

“You know, my heart cries when I see photos of their little babies, or pictures of their young wives or handsome husbands back home. But I feel like I’m doing all this for the soldiers. I imagine them right here, watching over me as I work. For a few days while I’m working on their belongings, I come to know them. I feel all the grief, I do. But then I remember: I’m helping their family; I’m helping their story continue.”

I watch her begin to work on the name tag in her hands, and again I see the immaculate regard she brings to her work. Looking over at the clean belongings waiting for shipment, I notice the soldier’s patrol cap perched next to a squared-off stack of his t-shirts. The cap’s been cleaned and scrubbed. But Natalie has also taken stiff brown paper, bunched it into the right shape, and gently pressed it into the inside of the cap. With the cap placed on top of all the beautifully packed belongings, his family back home will soon lift the lid on his footlocker, and they’ll see his cap, proud and tall, right next to the family photos he kept close in battle.

Natalie sees me looking at the cap, and gazes at me with a fierce, bright tenderness in her eyes.

BIO: Elizabeth Heaney, a psychotherapist for over thirty years, recently embraced a tsunami of change in order to create more room for her writing life.  She writes both fiction and non-fiction; she's working on her first novel, set in India.  E-mail: eheaneyma@aol.com

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