Jilly Carrell is working to change the narrative around our military bereaved, to bring together the families, the MoD, the armed forces charity sector and the NHS - because we must do better for families who have lost their loved ones whilst serving this country.
"After 18 years of ‘following the flag,’ I thought I knew everything there was to know about being an army wife - and it’s not like the films, all mess parties and choirs of earnest love.
I’d met Nick just before 9:11 and then we all lived in the world of Before and After. We had met in Edinburgh, joyful and hopeful and we had so many plans for our life as a military couple. It seemed straightforward, an honourable choice; the sacrifices we would have to make – moving house and home and adopting a portfolio career seemed small in the context of Service to our country. Nick had been born into a military family. His grandmother had built Spitfires during the war, so to him, this was always the path. His flamboyance as a cavalry officer and his willingness to throw himself into his calling headlong was appealing to me and an easy choice to make from the safety of love and hope and relative innocence.
But then came Iraq, and the dawning realisation that the commitment we had thought we were making was going to take a different shape, a shape we hadn’t, as a country seen before, and certainly one, as a young family we hadn’t anticipated. We had no idea what was to come - and that Afghanistan was to be the backdrop to our family life for the next 15 years.
So then came the repeat deployments (five of them to Helmand Province, Afghanistan) and the endless separation - 7 or 8 months at a stretch – oceans of time with the weeks and weeks of pre-deployment training and the ‘decompressions’ afterwards, where we all learned to tip-toe around each other after the initial homecoming explosion of war-torn service person reintegrates into insular family life. I had so many weeks and months, and then years of lone terrifying parenting, four rounds of solo IVF, and the loss of two pregnancies - but then two beautiful daughters, born 18 months apart whilst my husband fought alongside the Americans, the Danes, the Australians, the Afghans and so many others, but especially his friends.
So many days passed - fear and exhaustion blurring the lines between Mondays and Fridays and weekends were the same but more isolated than I could have imagined. He missed birthdays, anniversaries, first steps, small teeth, scraped knees, nativity plays, reading books, labradors and kittens.
He missed the children and sometimes he even missed me, I think. Although they trained it out of him, the longing and the fear. I just had to learn to bury it the harder way.
We worked our way through 12 or more houses, getting used to the mould and brown synthetic carpets and the same front doors and magnolia walls you were never allowed to paint. Sometimes I worked part-time if I could find a job where people would employ a military spouse with the endless burdens of a husband in a war zone. I certainly didn’t work as much as I was qualified to do and not as much as I would have liked. But the little girls were mostly mine. My friends were different every time we moved and I spent most of my days afraid, waiting for that knock at the identikit front door.
We moved every two years, sometimes less, leaving our friends and the schools and our temporary lives behind us. Packing and unpacking, hanging pictures on the re-filled walls, creating a home, a mountain out of a redbrick molehill. Until he finally served his final tour in Afghanistan and came home to a flurry of gangly teenagers, puppies who now had greying muzzles and a wife with a seen it all before look.
But we hadn’t seen it all, because after all the terrifying Afghan years, the holding of breath, the holding of hands, sometimes his hands around my throat - PTSD an unwelcome mistress in our marriage - his final homecoming brought with him an unwelcome passenger from the desert he’d embedded in for all the years.
Six weeks into the pandemic, stage 4 melanoma crawled into our hushed lockdown quarter. The raised brown islands on my husband’s skin squirmed and screamed through his cells, and made themselves at home in his spine, his bones and his brain. Nick died 8 months later.
Our daughters were 12 and 14.
He died the day they went back to school, after a year in isolation, watching their brave strong Daddy lose his war on cancer.
We lost our home, our community and the school the children attended. We weren’t an army family anymore and the system moved us on. Our lives were irrevocably changed, with the unique challenges that military families face, previously unknown to me, now a harsh reality.
It was then I realised that I didn’t know everything about being an army spouse. I didn’t know that we had months to vacate the quarter we called home, that my children would soon become ineligible for their educational bursaries, that the officer the army gave us to ‘transition out’ would be permitted to support my devastated little family for just six weeks, before other more pressing duties found her assigned elsewhere.
I learned that after two weeks, no one from the MoD calls, that they think when they’ve handed you a purple pack and an indecent pension that they have “extracted from the bereaved family as clinically as possible" - their words, not mine. I learned that no one talks about transition for the spouse or breakfast clubs or drop-ins. And for our bereaved children, they lose their home, their school, their identity and their parent.
We had to leave the community we’d lived in for almost two decades - were we still armed forces? No, we’re not serving. Were we veterans? No, we had never served.
So who are we? We’re adrift and so are so many other military bereaved families.
I am working to change the narrative around our military bereaved, to bring together the families, the MoD, the armed forces charity sector, the NHS and other support pathways - because we must do better for families who have lost their loved ones whilst serving this country.
And so, Beyond the Wire was born. An advocacy charity for the armed forces bereaved community, Championing Life After Loss for the Armed Forces Family.
I hope we can work towards systemic policy and societal change when we consider the lives that our bereaved military families have lived.
Please help me to spread the word to help raise awareness in galvanising better support to the military bereaved community and in bringing about systemic change in the space that the armed forces community gives to families like mine.
Thanks for reading.
Championing life after loss for the armed forces family
