Widows Caught in the Red Tape
by Allison Perkins
As the group’s current leadership ages, it is young wives like Arroyave who will be the ones to take the helm. “I’m disappointed in a lot of ways,” Arroyave says. “My husband obviously supported his commander-in-chief 100 percent. I’m disappointed by how political this all is and the red tape we have to go through. It’s so political when it should be so simple.
“Unless Congress hears from us on these injustices, it’s not going to be fixed,” she says. “We’re dealing with so much. We shouldn’t have to tell Congress, ‘Hey look, this is not fair.’ It’s exhausting.”
They shouldn’t, but the Gold Star Wives have become heroic champions of their own causes. Arroyave and others say the group has helped them fix problems in a matter of days that would have taken months had they followed Veterans Affairs protocol.
“I’m so grateful for their knowledge and help,” Arroyave says. “I know they need younger widows to have the organization continue and who knows, one day we may be 80 and unfortunately, though I don’t want to think about it, there will be younger widows we can help guide.”
Wersel has spent time in front of Congress to urge the politicians to adopt an amendment that gave equal death gratituities to all widows, regardless of whether their spouse died in a combat zone. Before the spouses tackled the issue, a $100,000 payment was given only to the families of soldiers killed in combat or training. Since Wersel’s husband died in the gym, she was paid just $12,000.
“No death should be determined with any more importance than another,” Wersel says. The amendment passed without opposition.
Be sure, though, that’s not Wersel’s last face off with Congress. As one of the Gold Star Wives’ rising legislative stars, Wersel says she plans to continue to fight for widows’ rights. But for the moment, she’s taking a break to move out of the home she and her husband were renting when he died and begin life anew.
She has to pack everything — alone. It’s the first time she’s moved without her husband’s help. She has to sift through his things — decide what stays and what goes. Wersel laughs and says, “His ugly clothes are already gone.”
But his really nice dress shirts she’s keeping for herself. She’ll wear them to bed each night when she turns in alone. As the day of the move approaches, she’s found herself up at 3 a.m. every morning, “trying to figure out, ‘How in the world am I going to do it?’” She says she knows she can. She’s reassured by the women who are doing it.
Wersel rereads an e-mail she received from the Gold Star Wives chat room. It read, “Whatever it is, we can do it, because we’re the women that our husbands’ married. We’re who they chose to marry, because they knew we were capable of handing anything.’
Yes, Wersel says, we can.