9/11

Chapter 24 - Every Day is Your Last

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Link: Every Day Is Your Last Title Page and Description

CAUTION - Highly Emotional Content

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I didn't hear about Jack or Rich until I'd been deployed to Bagram for over six months. When they extended our deployment another six, we were given ten-day Leaves. Mine came up first in rotation, so I got to fly back to Guam where I called Jenny as soon as I could get off base. She told me and I dug up the details after they were already buried and gone.

Heather got a letter from Rich's CO that he'd been killed while volunteering for picket duty, but he didn't know about the association between Rich and Jack, so Heather didn't find out about his death until she called to break the news to Erica. They met up at Arlington and it was the last time any of us in New Hampshire would see any of the California families again. Jenny was there to represent me as a 'friend of the family'. No one ever knew about us while I was serving. I made sure it never showed and Jenny was a rock! She passed the time I was gone with Heather, Faith, her folks, and a promise.

After the funeral, everyone just stopped communicating. It... it was like their deaths killed more than their bodies. It killed their families. Last I ever heard from Erica was a Christmas card from her that she must have sent before she got the letter about Jack, but I didn't even know about that until almost two years later when I came home. After so much time and pain, I just couldn't bring myself to call or write her.

When Erica finally wrote Heather, and she wrote back, none of us knew just how important those letters would become or how much they would change all our lives.

Chapter 23 - No Greater Love

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Link: Every Day Is Your Last Title Page and Description

CAUTION - Highly Emotional Content
CAUTION - Violence

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We mourned with Heather and Rich when they got the news about her not being able to have any more kids. She and Rich wanted more, but things are the way they have to be, right? That's what Jack always used to say. They moved north that fall while Rich worked at fixing up the big house.

They surprised Jenny and I when they told us they were going to give the little house to us. No rent meant Jenny could quit and I could open my own salon with her as my office manager. So in spring of ninety-nine, just after Faith's first birthday, we moved to be with Heather and Rich in Pittsberg.

Meanwhile, Jack and Erica had their own share of troubles. She caught an ectopic pregnancy three months after Jenny and I moved, days after Heather's twenty-fifth birthday, that nearly killed her. She had a radical hysterectomy that saved her life, but meant they too would only have one child. Rich and Heather flew all four of us down there, staying nearly a month, but we had to come home eventually, leaving Jack and Erica alone again. Judith broke her promise and tried tearing them apart, and Frank separated from her over it, though they reconciled after... well...

Things were never the same after that. They never came back to visit us in New Hampshire. Jack couldn't leave his business and Jenny and I couldn't leave ours, and Heather had her practice, so that trip in summer of ninety-nine was the last I ever saw Jack or Erica. We kept in touch, but not enough.

Then everything changed... for everyone.

Every Day is Your Last

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Jack Dunning was just a poor kid from Pittsburgh, no better or worse than any other. When he met Richard, it seemed to be a one-sided friendship; Jack needing Richard much more than the other way around. As the years passed however, it became clear to them both just how important their friendship was, eventually culminating in both learning the hardest lesson in life; that every day is a gift and you should treat each one as though it were your last.

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