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(Published Aug. 9, 2006)

        Jean Durgin said goodbye to her son’s friend after a brief visit at her Henniker home recently. She asked him to come by again soon. He said it’s been a busy summer. She smiled. When he was gone, she lifted her glasses to wipe away tears.

        More than two months after 23-year-old Russell Durgin was killed while fighting in Afghanistan, his mother’s mood can change from day to day, minute to minute.

        Sometimes she’s telling stories, pressing her hand to her chest and looking up to the ceiling as she laughs. In a moment, she talks tearfully and bitterly about the war and the way in which it took her son.

        Russell Durgin, an Army sergeant, died June 13 defending the sniper team he had led on a mission in the remote Korengal Valley. In the weeks that followed his death, his body was received home with honors befitting a hero: a flag flown in his name above the State House, a candlelight vigil attended by hundreds and a flag-lined funeral procession. Friends and strangers alike turned out to salute him.

        But those who feel Durgin’s absence in their daily lives mourn more than the hometown hero. Their grief is daily and consuming.

For his mother, it is in emptying the basket of batteries and toothbrushes she had collected to add to his care packages. For his father, it is accepting that Russell’s letters from the field will stop coming in the mail. For his fiancée, it’s closing her elaborate scrapbooks of the two of them. For his twin brother, it’s realizing that there won’t be time to catch up after years of military service had kept them apart.

        Jean Durgin has said that she wants people to see her grief and know there are many more families experiencing the same thing. At least 3,261 coalition servicemen and -women have died in Iraq and Afghanistan. More than 50 have been killed in Afghanistan since Russell Durgin's death.

        “If you multiply my pain times all of that, you still don’t understand what that pain means,” Jean Durgin said.

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Brian Lehmann/Concord Monitor