The pain is in personal effects

BY GRAHAM RAYMAN | Newsday Staff Writer

May 29, 2006

Second in an occasional series that examines how families cope when a loved one is killed in combat.

After Lance Cpl. Michael Postal died in Iraq, after the funeral and the burial and the well wishers returned to their lives, his father John Rajeh faced a dilemma amid his grief: what to do with his son's 2002 Hyundai Elantra.

For three months, the car sat outside their Glen Oaks, Queens, home, quiet, waiting. He couldn't let it go, but couldn't bring himself to drive it, either.

Finally, Rajeh's wife, Wendy, solved the problem. She started using it to commute to the public school where she teaches because it connected her to Postal, her stepson.

"When I first started driving it, it even smelled a bit like him," Wendy Rajeh said. "It makes me feel closer to him."

The couple didn't have as much luck sifting through the rest of Postal's belongings: 21 years worth of memories tucked into their cramped, two-bedroom apartment.

"When I started with one thing, I knew I was going to end up going through everything, and I'm just not ready to start with it," said Rajeh, whose son was killed last year on his second Iraq tour.

As America celebrates Memorial Day, a national day of remembrance of all who died in military service, the hesitance that Rajeh feels in dealing with his son's possessions must sound all too familiar to many of the nearly 3,000 families who have lost family members in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Indeed, in many homes, long after a death, parents, spouses and children struggle with what to do with all the things left behind: The uniforms of teams their loved one played on. The photographs, from family vacations to graduations. The trophies that tell a story of triumph. The letters and cards that retell the milestones reached. The school papers. The drawers full of T-shirts.

Even the automobiles their sons loved that symbolize a time when their lives were ahead of them.

"One of the toughest things is going through the personal effects," said Bill Lynch, 66, of Jericho, a retired FBI agent who now works as a consultant. His son Matthew, a 25-year-old Marine lieutenant on his third tour in Iraq, was killed by a roadside bomb on Oct. 31, 2004. Nineteen months later, Lynch and his wife, Angela, only recently completed the difficult task.

A few items from each phase

Sitting in a McDonald's near his office, the elder Lynch picked up a plastic coffee stirrer.

"If Matt held this, I'd look at it and go, 'OK, what about that?'" he said. "You wonder what is significant and what is not. You emotionally weigh every item."

The couple struggled with the task for months and eventually decided to keep a few items from each phase of their son's life. That meant retaining two of his Marine Corps uniforms, along with his trophies in swimming and baseball at Jericho High School and Duke University that will go in the basement, where Lynch, an avid triathlete, works out. They also included Matt's Jones Beach lifeguard gear.

Earlier this month, as part of their own coming to terms with their son's death, the couple attended the funeral of Michael LiCalzi, a Marine lieutenant killed May 11.

"I'm looking at his parents, and all I could think of is there's a whole progression of things they will go through," Lynch said. "His car comes back, then his Iraq gear comes back with the dust still on it, then his stateside gear. It's just a wrenching experience."

Rajeh, 39, stores some of Postal's things in a closet in the room he shared with his younger sister, Samantha: collared shirts, jeans, slacks, his old Nintendo and X-box video games, DVDs and boxes of old math tests and essays. In a storage locker in New Hyde Park, Rajeh has placed his son's desk, his lamps, his iPod, the remainder of his clothes, his computer equipment, sneakers, boots, dress pants and dress shoes.

"Pretty much everything that he had is still here or in the locker," Rajeh said.

Postal, a 21-year-old Marine, who interned in New York City police headquarters as a teenager and lost 140 pounds on a tough regimen of diet supplements and exercise to qualify for the corps, was killed in Iraq by a roadside bomb during a supply mission on May 7, 2005. He was five months into his second tour in Iraq, after enlisting in 2001.