For the first nine months after Larry Roukey died, his wife, Ryann, filled her life with tributes to her late husband and the responsibilities of raising two children alone. There was the funeral, a benefit picnic for the family, the acceptance of a Purple Heart and a speech in California to the postal workers union.

Then the holidays came, and she began to feel the terrible weight of his absence. As she watched members of the Maine National Guard return to their families this spring, she felt the full force of the realization that had been delayed nearly a year: Her husband was never coming home.

“I think the first nine months everything was just so surreal,” she said. “I don’t know if there was a part of me that didn’t want to believe he was gone.”

As the anniversary of her husband’s death on April 26 approached, Ryann Roukey prepared to go on a trip to Key West – a place her late husband had planned to take her. She still mourns the loss of her husband and takes each day of her new life as it comes. At the same time, she doesn’t want Larry Roukey to be forgotten.

A member of the Army Reserves, Larry Roukey died at the age of 33 in a large explosion while he was performing site security at a suspected chemical weapons factory in Baghdad. He had two children, a 2-year-old son, Nicholas, and a 15-year-old stepdaughter, Sonya.

A postal worker, Roukey had reenlisted in the Reserves a short time after the terrorist attack on Sept. 11, 2001. Serving in the military was a tradition in Roukey’s family. His father, Robert, had served 10 years, and his grandfather had served 32 years. Yet, few of Roukey’s friends and coworkers knew he was going to Iraq because he rarely brought it up in conversation.

A fellow postal worker, Bob Olbrias, recalled, a couple weeks after Roukey’s death, his parting words before leaving for Iraq. “See you in a while,” he had said. When fellow workers asked him where he was going, they were surprised to hear him respond, “Iraq.”

“He always struck me as if he really wanted to do this,” Ryann Roukey said in an interview two months after his death. “He was ready for this. He never had any feeling that he didn’t want to go.”

Preserving his memory

In the year since her husband’s death, Roukey has tried to spread her late husband’s story to as many people as she could. She spoke to 3,500 postal workers about him in Los Angeles, Calif., last August.

“I wanted people to know what kind of person Larry Roukey was,” she said.

Roukey said she was nervous about speaking to such a large crowd. During the speech, she said she tried to keep talking and focus on what she had written. The president of the Portland union, who attended the speech, later told her, “Two minutes into your speech, you could hear a pin drop.”

While she has spread his story to many who never knew him, she has had to watch his memory fade in one of those closest to him – his son, Nicholas, who was just 2 years old when his father died.

She recently took Nicholas, who is now 3, to Joker’s Family Fun ‘n’ Games on Warren Avenue – his father’s favorite place to take him.

“This used to be daddy’s favorite place to bring you,” she recalled saying to him.

“Daddy’s never been here,” he said to her.

That was when she realized Nicholas was too young when his father died to remember much about him. She still has pictures of his father around the house, and Nicholas has heard adults talk about who his father was. But he doesn’t remember most of the places they went or the things they did together or to really understand what happened to his father.

“We still blow hugs and kisses to him every night and say ‘I love you,'” she said. “That’s never stopped.”

Someone who understood

Roukey remembers sitting on her front porch about a week before her husband died and reading a story in the newspaper about another Maine soldier who had died in Iraq, Spc. Christopher Gelineau. She read the story from beginning to end.

“I said ‘I can’t even imagine what she’s going through,'” she said of Lavinia Gelineau, the soldier’s widow. “Sure enough, six days later I was going through the same thing.”

Roukey remembers Gelineau, who was murdered recently, as a strong woman. Even though her husband had just died, she came Larry Roukey’s wake.

The scene is still vivid in Roukey’s mind: Gelineau approaching her and taking her hands. For a while, both women just looked into the other’s eyes without speaking. “I remember her saying ‘no one will ever know what we’ve gone through,'” said Roukey.

At that moment, she felt a bond between them. “I felt like I had known this person all my life,” said Roukey.

Gelineau’s father, Nicolae Onitiu, murdered her earlier this month at her new home in Westbrook. Roukey said she’ll never forget the moment she learned, while reading an e-mail, that Lavinia had died.

“I just remember feeling envy for a moment that she was actually with Chris, not that I want to die, but just for that split second,” she said. “She’s with her true love. I do believe I’ll see Larry again. But now’s obviously not my time.”

‘The day as it comes’

Larry Roukey had planned to do a couple of things for his family when he returned from Iraq. He wanted to take his wife and children to Walt Disney World, and to take his wife to Key West for their anniversary.

Last fall, Ryann Roukey fulfilled one of those plans by taking the kids to Disney World. Although she found the trip to be a bit hectic, she said she knows the kids had a good time.

Roukey returned Monday from the trip to Key West. She said she almost didn’t go because she felt as though it wouldn’t be right to go without him, but her sister urged her to go.

The Postal Service held a tribute to Larry Roukey Tuesday morning at the Forest Avenue post office. The Postal Service presented Roukey with a portrait of her late husband, which had been drawn by a fellow postal worker. The commanding officer of Larry Roukey’s military unit presented her with a plaque. “It was a nice tribute to him,” she said.

Later that day, she planned to visit his gravesite with her daughter. “We’ll go out to the cemetery and maybe sit and read a couple poems I’ve written, and just take the day as it comes.”

Ryann Roukey accepts a plaque on the anniversary of her husband, Larry Roukey’s, death in Iraq.

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