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A couple stung by grief, six years after learning their son was among the first casualties of the war in Iraq. A soldier who lost three buddies and four years of his life. A young mother recently widowed, still in shock. All stories of loss here at home from a war that continues abroad.

***

Then, she slept soundly.

Now, she wakes up every two hours, feels like she hasn’t been to bed in six years and doesn’t remember her dreams. Just the few that he’s in.

Then, she surrounded herself with friends.

Now, she can’t stand groups. After an hour at her daughter’s birthday party, she called it quits. Told them to take her home.

Then, she thought there may be a god.

Now, she knows there’s no such thing.

Brenda Lam  measures time by the death of her son. Before and after. Then and now.

Six years ago — April 22, 2003  — Alan Lam died in Iraq. The Marine from Snow Camp became the first from the Piedmont to die in that war and still, at just 19 years old, is the youngest casualty from these parts.

Then, he was one of 131 . Now, he’s one of more than 5,100.

“You feel like you’re stuck in some kind of time warp where everything is moving faster than you are,” Brenda says, dragging on a cigarette.

Now, she smokes too much.

Alan’s room is tucked in the corner of her small home. Clothes that will never be worn. A bed no one is allowed to use. His drawings held in picture frames now coated in a light layer of dust. And the boots he wore in Iraq by his bedside, as if waiting for someone to slip them on.

Pictures and furniture have been added and moved, but for the most part, the room looks like it did when it happened, when a grenade malfunctioned and killed the young Marine during a training exercise.

In the past six years, so much in this house has remained steady, untouched.

His room.

Her pain.

“It’s still the same,” she says, blinking back tears. “It’s not any better.”

***

The grenade was meant for him, but it missed its target.

The main drag of Sadr City, a suburb of Baghdad,  had been quiet that morning as John Oliver’s  convoy patrolled the streets. As they came to a stop, the grenade passed in front of his vehicle and hit a scooter passing in the next lane.

Now, the image spills out in vivid detail.

A man lies in the street next to the bike. His son cries as the pool of blood around his father grows larger. A medic tries to help, but the father is gone.

At home in Greensboro , it’s one of the memories John tries to avoid.

“I always see that little boy,” he says.

By the time he left Iraq — after two tours  and 31 months  in the country — John had gained that memory and lost three buddies.

On his right wrist, he wears a black cuff with their names and the dates they died printed in silver type. John, 26, knows their families live in Texas and Louisiana, but he’s not sure when he’ll be ready to reach out to them.

“I still go through points where it doesn’t seem real ... ,” he says. “Nothing’s really hit me hard yet. Hopefully it won’t.”

Just three weeks   after his official discharge from the Army , John focuses on restarting his life, fusing together the two worlds he has been living in.

Iraq, at times, feels like a dream. The first time he was shot at, still surreal.

And Greensboro — with nephews that grew old while he was gone and a wife he barely saw during the first year of their marriage — feels new.

“I’m ready to be settled and start life over again ... ,” he says. “It’s kind of like the last  41/2 years have been a time warp.”

***

He had picked out his tux, all white. And she had picked out her shoes: rhinestone sandals with a bow in the back.

The colors would be coral and canary yellow.

And the dress — she hadn’t bought it yet, but she knew which one she wanted. The white A-line gown covered in lace.

“It was so, so pretty,” Nikja Gadson, 27,  says.

The church ceremony would have been just a formality. She had officially married Laron Lawrence Gadson  through paperwork filed while he was in Iraq.

The first time they were together as husband and wife, she was receiving his body at the airport.

Today, in the living room of her Greensboro  home, Nikja remembers getting the news — the call from her mother-in-law, her own screams in the moments after, and then the soldiers arriving.

She met them in the front yard.

“I said to them that they had just taken a piece of my heart I will never get back,” she says.

Her husband, at age 24 , died in a car accident in Germany . His body arrived in Greensboro on June 9 , the day he was scheduled to come home from his first tour in Iraq. 

Their daughter, Alanna,  turned 3 last week.  Laron joined the military the day after she was born. 

They used to video chat every day, Nikja turning the camera on Alanna so her father could watch her play and grow.

Now, when Nikja opens her computer, her daughter goes to the screen. S he wants to talk to Daddy.

“You know, sweetie, we can’t talk to Daddy,” Nikja says.

“Daddy’s in heaven?” she asks.

Nikja knows that it will get harder as her daughter gets older.

“I hope that she accepts it and she won’t go through what we had to go through,” she says.

It hits Nikja sometimes — when she sees Alanna’s profile or catches “the prettiness” in her eyes. Just how much she looks like her father.

It’s only been three months. 

She’s still in shock.

But in those moments with her daughter, it becomes painfully clear that they will  have to grow without him.

Laron was the one who used to drive that process, the planner in the family who forced his wife  to look beyond tomorrow.

“When he was around, it was always such a clear picture to see. There was more to life than what you have in front of you … ,” she says. “I have to do that for myself. But he made it a lot more clear.”

***

As Brenda lets her head fall into her hands, her husband, Adam Lam,  sits down on the edge of the couch.

Before, as his wife talked about Alan — the youngest of five and their only son — Adam moved through the house, standing in doorways and then disappearing into the bedroom, sitting for a minute and sharing a few words before quietly slipping away again.

“I don’t take my fishing pole and go to the lake anymore … ,” he says in a hush. “It’s something the father and son used to do together. Fishing together, hunting together. Now you walk into the woods, you look. What do you sit down here for? … Now, you turn around and walk right back out.”

Two cars sit in the driveway of their home. One, a blue Acura that Alan bought for himself before he left. The other, a black CRX they bought for him but he never got to see.

Brenda is fixing up the second car, replacing the tires, putting in yellow and black seats — Alan’s favorite colors — and giving it a new coat of paint .

She won’t sell it.  It’s his.

The family visits him  at Arlington National Cemetery  in Washington when they can.

After years of fighting with her husband, Brenda agreed to give up his ashes.

They both knew he deserved a headstone there. She just had a harder time letting go.

“When I go to Arlington,” she says, “it takes all of me to not dig up his urn — because it’s not that deep.”

The ashes used to sit in their dining room, at the base of a Buddhist shrine that honors Adam’s religion.

Two massive pictures of Alan — his military photo and a high school portrait —  fill the back wall. Wax candles from birthday celebrations held in his absence lie near Buddhist statues and incense burners. His dog tags and hat hang in the center.

There’s no god, no Buddha, no nothing, Brenda says. But the shrine helps her feel close to a son who in some ways — in her pain and in his room — has never left the house.

Every night as the sun sets, they switch on the electric candles above the mantle.

“It’s comforting, you know, because when you light the incense, you can say what you want to say, ” she says.

“The belief is that the spirit wanders all over during the day, but at night the lights show them how to get back home to where they’re supposed to be.”