Unpacking the Box

We received a box last week from our son who has joined the Navy. He arrived at boot camp, and the first thing they do is have you remove all of your clothes and change into their clothes. Then, you place all of your belongings into a box--shoes, socks, underwear, jeans, phone, change from your pocket---all of it into the box and then you seal it up and address it to your home. That's it. You send away everything but your naked self, and then that person is marched off to be transformed from a civilian to a Sailor.

This week,  I decided I'd open it up and get his phone out and put it on his charger, and launder his clothes so I could put all of his belongings into a couple of new boxes. By February, he should be moved on to his first command, probably submarine school, and he'll be allowed to have his possessions again. I wanted to have everything ready so it would be handy to send on to him.

I opened the box, I withdrew his big blue hoodie with the bold NAVY printed in gold across the front. It smelled like him---Axe and Old Spice deodorant. I flashed back to the last time I'd touched this: hugging him good-bye in the doorway as his dad and he set off to the airport on the morning he left for the recruit training center. He's a tall, big person and he has to crouch a little to hug me back. I wanted to hang on, or go with him to make sure no one treated him badly---of course I couldn't. He was ready, so ready! He'd bought this beautiful pull-over to proudly wear on the journey to his new life.

But, I also imagined (just for a minute, then I had to shove that idea away) how it would be to open a box like that when you knew you wouldn't be seeing your son again. There were two missionaries killed last month when a car hit their bicycles. There are military men and women who die far from home every week. Their families get a box and experience that feeling in completely different way than I did. I don't know how they can bear it! When you unpack a box like that, the smells are what you notice.

I remember when CoolGuy went away the first time with the Marines to Saudi Arabia. He was a civilian, but he wore a uniform and lived in their conditions and was subject to the same dangers. It was scary. It was also hard because it didn't take long to forget tangible things about him. I remember burying my face in his motorcycle jacket as it hung on the coat rack in our room. It smelled like him and like the road. But after a couple of months, it just smelled like my room. He wrote that he'd like me to send him a big towel, and so I bought one, and then slept with it for a couple of nights. He noticed. When he came home and we were unpacking his boxes of clothes, sand sifted out of every nook and pocket and seam. It was different sand than our beach there in SoCal. There was a smell in the boxes, too. He said it was the smell of the desert and diesel and sweat.

How could you stand to unpack a box that held the belongings of your loved one who'd been gone for months and months, living in a foreign place you'd never been. How could you bear to smell them on the clothes and see their fingerprints smudging the letters you'd sent with the "love you" and the "be safe" you'd carefully written hoping that it would be true. How could you bear finding the dirty socks and the sweaty t-shirts knowing that you'll wash them, but they won't be needed again.

I hope to never find out.