There is no playbook for grief. But in 2010, when Amy Looney learned that her husband, Brendan, a Navy SEAL, had been killed in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan, she turned to someone who understood in a very specific way what she had lost.
It was Ryan Manion Borek, the sister of her husband’s best friend, who was killed by a sniper in Iraq in 2007.
The two women met briefly at the funeral for Ryan’s brother, Marine 1st Lt. Travis Manion. Now, at Brendan’s funeral, Ryan looked at Amy and saw a reflection of herself.
“She was in the place I was in three years earlier, and it was really surreal,” Ryan recalled.
These days, the two are in the same place in a new way — running the Travis Manion Foundation, a service and support organization that Ryan’s mother, Janet, started after Travis’s death.
Stella Neverosky, 6, pauses to smell a rose as she was putting flowers next to the headstones of veterans buried in section 60 on Monday. Her dad, Danny Neverosky was friends with Travis Manion and Brendan Looney. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)On Monday, Amy, Ryan and other family members attended breakfast at the White House and went to President Obama’s wreath-laying ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery before heading to Section 60, where the two servicemen lie next to each other.
[When ‘brother’ means more than blood]
As Ryan’s daughters, Maggie and Honor, arranged long-stemmed roses across the graves, the adults greeted friends – including classmates of Travis and Brendan as well as men who served with them.
Many were also visiting the graves of others killed in the war. “We unfortunately know a good amount of them,” Ryan said.
Amy nodded. Just weeks earlier, a good friend of Brendan was killed in Iraq. “You know, Iraq, people think it’s quiet,” she said. “But there are still people who are putting themselves in harm’s way there.”
Brendan and Travis had been inseparable, so each of the women had gotten to know both men well — Travis even tagged along on dates with Brendan and Amy when the men were midshipmen at the Naval Academy in Annapolis.
But the women bonded only after Brendan died.
It developed in little ways, such as Amy knowing she wanted oversize black sunglasses for Brendan’s funeral because that’s what Ryan wore at Travis’s. But soon it was clear they also had big things in common.
Like work. Ryan had a small clothing boutique, which she thought she would run forever, and Amy sold medical devices. But after Ryan lost her brother and Amy lost her husband, those jobs felt thin.
“There’s such an honor in the way that they died, knowing it was in service to their country, that you start to question how you’re contributing to society,” Ryan said. “What purpose are you contributing to the greater good?”
In 2009, she began working at the foundation her mother had started. The nonprofit organization had a national reach by the time Brendan died; Amy volunteered there from time to time and started working at the foundation full-time two years later.
After Janet Manion died in 2012 of cancer at age 58, the younger women took charge of the foundation and became even closer.
[Read Janet Manion’s obituary]
Amy is the godmother of Ryan’s two-year-old son, who is named Travis Brendan, for both fallen service members. When the foundation opened an office in the District, Amy moved from San Diego to run it; Ryan runs the headquarters in Doylestown, Pa., near Philadelphia.
The foundation supports veterans and families of fallen service members, and it challenges young people to push themselves and serve their communities, whether through racing for a cause or cooking meals and giving them to homeless people. The organization trains veterans to educate and inspire high school students to service, pulling in $10 million in cash and in-kind donations annually.
It is, Amy and Ryan say, what the guys would have wanted.
“You can really choose two paths — you can go down this dark road where you’re sad and you don’t really push yourself to enjoy the things in life, and some never come out of it,” Ryan said. “We really connected in that we both wanted to carry on Brendan and Travis’s legacy in a way that meant something to people. . . . Our whole idea is to play a part in that civilian-military divide — when vets are coming back and they’re transitioning; it allows them to continue to serve, to showcase the fact that they are civic assets and continue to play a role in inspiring the next generation.”
For the women, working together also helps them continue to feel close to the men they lost.
“After they’re gone, you really rely on some of the memories and stories to keep some of the good stuff alive,” Amy said. “She knew I knew Travis so well, and I knew she knew Brendan well.”
When a loved one dies, “there is a sense of isolation you feel, like you’re the only person this ever happened to, and the only thing that pulls you out of that is being around other loved ones who are on that journey,” Ryan said.
On a typical Memorial Day, the women spend several hours at the gravesite in Section 60, with chairs and a cooler of food and a bottle of Patron, Travis’s favorite tequila.
“We kind of pass the bottle around. Everybody does a toast,” Ryan said. “People stop by throughout the day and come up. Some of them we know, some of them we don’t know; they’ve just kind of heard Travis and Brendan’s story.”
Rain was forecast on Monday, so they left the chairs and comestibles at home.
When they arrived, some items had already been placed on the two headstones. A couple of pennies. Small stones, painted with messages: “Hero,” “Respect,” “God Bless America.” A golf ball that read “Brendan, hit ’em straight.”
Their friendship was forged by shared grief and a mission. But Amy has a feeling it might have come about anyway. Brendan was something of a connector, even setting her up from afar on a “blind friend date” with the wife of a fellow serviceman he thought she’d get along with.
“Brendan would always tell me, ‘You’ve got to meet Ryan at some point. . . . The two of you have so much in common; you have to meet,’” Amy said.
Seeing how close they are now, she said, “I think he would be very happy.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/from-shared-grief-a-friendship–and-a-shared-mission/2016/05/30/effb06c6-2675-11e6-ae4a-3cdd5fe74204_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_memorial-day-7pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory
