Sonoma Stories: Having at last grieved, a Vietnam war widow returns to The Wall

When Pauline Laurent first put words to paper about the combat death of her husband in Vietnam and the personal hell that mired her down, she didn't intend to write a book.

“I was trying to save my life,” said Laurent, an Illinois-born Santa Rosa grandmother and life coach.

She was 22 years old and seven months pregnant when, 50 years ago this month, an enemy attack in the Mekong Delta killed her unborn daughter's father, Army Sgt. Howard Querry, 23.

Laurent wrote for therapy. Stuck in place, addicted and despondent, she nearly three decades ago began to release a clot of blocked emotion by composing letters to her dead husband and writing steadily deeper, more revealing entries to her journal.

“As I finally cry these tears which have been bottled up for so long,” she wrote to Howard in 1993, “I am regaining that 22-year-old maiden that you married.

“She died when you died. I want her back in my life. In order to get her back, I must experience the grief. I am strong enough now to feel the terror of your death - to open your coffin and look in. I couldn't do it back in '68.

“ … I'm beginning to say goodbye and realize you won't be knocking on my door someday as you've done a thousand times in my dreams. I'm beginning to be able to say goodbye.”

Laurent's letters and journal entries became a self-published book, “Grief Denied: A Vietnam Widow's Story.” Released in 1999, it's available at griefdenied.com.

Just a year ago, a copy was ordered by a Vietnam veteran who lives near St. Louis and who's related to Laurent as a second cousin but for most of his life didn't know it.

He's Gene Haltenhof, 69 and a former Huey UH-1H helicopter pilot who harbors many memories of Vietnam, some unspeakably ghastly. Working now as a veterans' claims examiner, Haltenhof read Laurent's book and marveled at what was for him a new perspective, that of a war widow.

Haltenhof said from Missouri the book's had a profound impact on him.

“I got to learn about another side,” he said.

He lost 16 friends in Vietnam and deals constantly with the toll of what he witnessed on 732 combat missions, but prior to reading “Grief Denied” he didn't fully grasp the effect of a soldier's death on a loved one back home.

Reading the book prompted Haltenhof to contact Laurent. “I became interested in her and her family and her story,” he said.

The two distant cousins, who've yet to meet, stay in touch through emails and texts. Laurent caught Haltenhof up about her daughter, Michelle, who's now 49, and her granddaughters, Alexis, 21, and Sadie, 17.

Haltenhof was aware that May 10, 2018, was the 50th anniversary of her husband's death. He and Laurent spoke of the milestone and that it presented a golden opportunity for Laurent to take her daughter and granddaughters to see The Wall - formally the Vietnam Veterans Memorial - in Washington, D.C.

Laurent said she'd love to do that. As she'd written in the book, in 1995 she and Michelle went to D.C. and read Howard's name on The Wall and it was an incredibly powerful experience. But, she told Haltenhof, she and her daughter and granddaughters couldn't afford to go to D.C. just now.

Haltenhof didn't let it go at that.

The combat veteran in Missouri reached out to his siblings and other kin and asked if they'd care to help him thank Laurent for her healing book by sending her and her family to The Wall 50 years after the loss of Sgt. Querry. Dollars and airline miles streamed in.

Laurent and Michelle and Michelle's daughters have scheduled the $3,000-plus trip to D.C. for Father's Day.

Laurent views it as an essential step to visit The Wall with Alexis and Sadie, who grew up in Sonoma County as the children of a woman who never met her father, and as the grandchildren of a woman who fought to liberate herself from an existence as a war widow languishing in the shadows.

Now a coach to widows and others whose lives are in transition, Laurent is grateful to have moved beyond the long period following her husband's death when she felt like a jumbled and strewn jigsaw puzzle.

“It's like all these puzzle people keep fitting together,” she said.

Laurent never remarried but 10 years after her husband's death changed her surname from Querry to her maiden name.

She said that forming other pieces of her reconstructed life were the letters she wrote him, her coming “out of the closet” with the grief-releasing talks she gave to gatherings of Vietnam Veterans of America, the therapy she received from a counselor in Santa Rosa, the divulging she did as a member of the Vietnam Veterans Writing Group and her journaling.

And key to her healing, Laurent said, is the stark and loving honesty of her daughter. She recalls telling 22-year-old Michelle in 1990, yet again, that she didn't want to live another day.

Fed up, Michelle responded, “If you want to die, go ahead. I can't save you. But just remember one thing, you can't change your mind. Death is permanent.

“You won't be here when I get married, and you won't be here when I have a baby.”

That jolted Laurent. She remembers thinking, “I had to find a way to get better.”

She wrote in her book, “And so began the slow, steady climb back to health. A few days later while kneeling on the floor at the foot of my bed and sobbing, it suddenly occurred to me call the psychiatrist of the local Army hospital and make an appointment.”

She met with a psychiatrist, agreed to go on an antidepressant and a short time later joined a 12-step program for help with a tangle of addictions.

The next big thing, was the 1992 announcement by Michelle and her boyfriend that they were going to marry.

“Something snapped in me,” Laurent said. “My denial cracked open. My life had been about raising my daughter and now she was raised.”

She wrote in “Grief Denied,” “Planning Michelle's wedding was the catalyst for me to address my unresolved grief … I cried every day during the six months of wedding planning. I lived alone, so I had no one to tell me to stop.

“I began to write as a way of sorting out my feelings. … As I spent more and more time writing, I encountered more and more grief.”

From the writing sprang the book. From the book sprang the connection to vet and second cousin Haltenhof, and the gift of a Father's Day family visit to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

When Laurent traveled with Michelle to The Wall in 1995, they found and gazed upon and wept before the engraved name of Howard Emerson Querry.

“One little name among 58,000 names,” his widow said. “If there was any more denial in me, it was gone after that.”

She wrote in her book that prior to that '95 trip, Michelle and her husband were trying without success to start a family. A month after the journey to the memorial, Michelle phoned her mother with news: She was going to have a baby.

Michelle also divulged to her mom: As she stood before her dad's name on the Vietnam Memorial, she'd confided to him that she and her husband could use some help with conception.

Ten months later - on Aug. 11, 1996 - Michelle gave birth to Alexis Madeline. On Father's Day, Lexi and her kid sister, Sadie, will let their mother and grandmother show them granddad's name on The Wall.

You can reach Staff Writer Chris Smith at 707-521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.