Her wedding anniversary was a 12-hour graveside vigil

Dwan Fairbanks spent her wedding anniversary with her husband, Jake, on Wednesday. But it wasn't the way she had hoped it might be, on a romantic cruise somewhere, just the two of them, enjoying the honeymoon they didn't have time to take.

Still, she made the best of it: Dwan brought roses and red wine and balloons to Jake. She even brought a blanket and ham-and-cheese sandwiches so they could be together all day.

And they were together all day: From 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., when the gates closed at Fort Snelling National Cemetery, where Specialist Jacob Fairbanks was laid to rest in Section R in April, leaving his sorrowing wife and children without their anchor.

Grief is powerful and raw, wrenching, overwhelming and unknowable from the outside. In the end, it is so elemental that it can be impossible to fully comprehend another's grief. But when you see someone lost in the loneliness of loss, you can get a glimpse into the deepest sadness that comes with being human. It can break your heart.

Dwan Fairbanks lost her husband four months ago to a war that, 4,150 American lives later, hardly anyone can explain or justify. Even in the midst of a presidential campaign, Iraq is hard to talk about. The chances seem slim for ending the war with honor and preserving the meaning and dignity of all those lives lost. Which makes it even harder to see a widow on her anniversary, sprawled beside her husband's grave.

But there she was.

"It's real hard," Dwan said, waiting for a morning rain shower to pass, two dozen red roses already placed next to Jake's new headstone. "This is my first anniversary without Jake. I'm going through all the 'firsts' without him. He was going to try to come home from Iraq on R&R for this day, and we were supposed to go on a cruise. I've been thinking about our wedding day and playing all the days out, from there, in my mind. I wish every day would have had more 'I love yous' and more affection and that I had spent them holding on a little tighter and a little longer. I wish I could do every day all over again."

Dwan and Jake were both from the East Side of St. Paul, Jake a Johnson High grad, Dwan from Harding. They met at Fort Campbell, Ky., where Jake was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 320th Field Artillery Regiment, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault). They married Aug. 27, 2005. Within weeks, he was at war, watching his unit take casualties (more than 225 soldiers from Fort Campbell have been killed in Iraq). He came home with demons of depression, sleeplessness and anxiety.

When he was assigned to go back to Iraq for a second tour, he talked with Dwan about dying, and worried what would happen to them all if he did.

Dwan made him see an Army doctor, who gave him medication for depression. He went back in January for an extended tour. On April 9, Dwan and Jake talked over the Internet for hours. She fed the kids, he asked about the baby, Kayla, whom the newlyweds had added to the blended family that already included Dwan's three children. He fretted that he was missing all of Kayla's firsts. Dwan had to keep leaving the computer to give the baby more cheese. He hadn't even known "Tati" -- his pet name for his daughter -- liked cheese. It may have seemed, even with the Internet, that he was a million miles from life.

Jake died a few hours later of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in Baghdad. Army investigators have not yet concluded what happened, but Dwan steadfastly believes that Jake would not have killed himself intentionally. He had too much to live for, she says.

He had his medicine with him when he died. But there was no trace of it in his system.

"I don't see why they'd just give him medicine and allow him to go back to Iraq without someone following up on him," Dwan said at the cemetery. "Soldiers are supposed to be strong. They defend us, so they don't like to admit they have a problem with depression."

She works at a Best Buy store near Fort Campbell, where she can live on base until next April, a year after Jake's death. She took a couple days off to fly home to spend the anniversary with Jake. As she was driving from the airport to St. Paul, she saw workers painting a giant American flag on a hill above Hwy. 5, near the interchange with Hwy. 55. It choked her up: She thought it was a tribute to the troops, including Jake.

When she found out it was just decoration to welcome the delegates to the Republican National Convention, she got mad. The giant flag wasn't a symbol of patriotic fervor. It was just political eye candy of the kind both parties wrap themselves in, especially during elections.

"That upset me," she said. "The war and getting all our people home needs to be the Number 1 thing of importance. We've lost so many lives. But sometimes it seems like it's just another life lost, each soldier -- that it's not important to anyone else."

Everyone waves the flag. Widows get the folded ones.

"I'm going to start looking for some grief counseling, now that the kids will be back in school," she says. "I'm going to hang on as long as I can. I'm ready to have 'the breakdown,' but I haven't had it yet. You'd think by now that it would be more of a reality to me, Jake's death. But it seems like he's still deployed. It doesn't seem real. I know that's crazy. But I love him so much. We always said it would never end."

"We always said goodbye by telling each other, 'Infinity, forever and one.' That was our saying. We told it to the kids at bedtime and we always signed off that way: 'Infinity, forever and one.' It meant, 'Always in this life, and forever in any life after.'"

She still feels Jake's presence, close at hand. A faucet he sometimes used to leave running starts running on its own now, in the middle of the night. She yelled at him once about it, when he let the sink overflow and she was late to work after mopping up. But she doesn't get angry at him anymore.

"I just smile and go in there and turn it off. It's almost like he's comforting me and telling me it's going to be all right. I know he's watching over me."

"I know it in my heart."

ncoleman@startribune.com • 612-673-4400