families Heroes at Sea by Colleen Jurkiewicz Dorman OR THOSE WHO HAVE LOST a parent who served in the United States Armed Forces, feelings of isolation can be overwhelming. These “gold star” children have few opportunities for fellow-ship with one another; strewn all over the country, they must often endure their pain in silence, feeling forever set apart from their civilian peers. “It’s this unfortunate lottery,” says Tiffany Eckert of Waterville, Ohio, whose husband, Sgt. Andy Eckert, was killed in action in 2005 when her second child Myles was only fi ve weeks old. “Our number was drawn and we were thrown into this fi shbowl that really doesn’t have a whole lot of other people in it.” The holiday seasons are especially diffi cult for the Eckert family. “It just kind of sneaks up on you,” said Eckert. “I don’t go into the day thinking, ‘This is going to be terrible,’ because I’m really a positive person, but it always creeps up...there were so many times where, on Thanksgiving, the kids and I were just at home, just us. And that’s OK, because that’s our family dynamic. It’s not like I would sit around feeling sorry for myself, but it’s sad. Thanksgiving’s rough.” It is that “rough Thanksgiving” experienced by so many grieving military families that inspired one nonprofi t to in-troduce a Thanksgiving-week cruise for gold star children and their surviving parents. The inaugural “Heroes at Sea” cruise, presented by the Camp Hometown Heroes organiza-tion, set sail from Miami on Nov. 22, 2014 with 81 individ-uals—among them the Eckerts—who had lost a loved one who served in the military. Accompanying the group were three therapists from Kyle’s Korner, a Wauwatosa, Wis.-based group that facilitates grief counseling in a support group setting. Though the families had plenty of time for recreation during the seven-day getaway, the cruise was heavily geared toward providing the emotional and psychological healing within the families. Lindsay Dusold, assistant program director of Kyle’s Korner, was one of the therapists who participated in the cruise. She said that camaraderie among kids who have suffered a similar loss is important for any young person 20 F dealing with grief, but especially so for gold star children. “You connect on a whole different level than some of your civilian support out there that just can’t really relate to the circumstances,” she said. “When you lose someone in combat, it’s just really complicated,” Eckert agreed. “I didn’t have to explain any-thing to the people on the cruise. They get it.” Throughout the week, Kyle’s Korner’s trained grief spe-cialists organized art therapy activities, group counseling sessions and a memorial service. “The cruise gives them a new tradition to start, and it gives them some fellowship, to be around people who un-derstand,” said Dusold. “They know what it’s like to (have a loved one) be deployed, they know what it’s like not to really have memories, to really understand who that per-son was and retain that information.” That’s a constant struggle faced by Eckert, who tries to keep her husband Andy’s memory alive for Myles, now 9, and his older sister Marlee, 11. But it’s a complicated thing to do when the children have virtually no memories of Andy that they can call their own. Marlee was born while Andy was serving his fi rst tour of duty in Iraq. It was during that tour that Andy was injured, resulting in the awarding of his fi rst of two Purple Hearts. He was deemed non-deployable, but signed a waiver to be able to return to Iraq with his unit. It was May 2006 when an improvised explosive de-vice detonated near the Humvee carrying her father in Samarra, Iraq, killing him. His second Purple Heart was posthumous. Marlee was 20 months old. “I thought, ‘They’ll be OK, I can do this, I’ll be able to tell them about their dad,’” said Eckert. “And I didn’t think that we would encounter some of the grief issues that we PURPLE HEART MAGAZINE May/June 2015