Shipmateship, Loss, and Life

I can’t believe I’m writing this. I’m heartbroken to say that two weeks ago one of my first Sailors passed away due to a sudden, aggressive cancer. She only had two months.

Suzzanna Hubert was more of a loner, quiet, but she found her place in our small, tight-knit division. She wasn’t always well-treated by the Navy; I remember her struggles to get off-base housing as an older, female E-5 who didn’t want to be in the barracks. I remember our talks about why she joined the Navy. About how it wasn’t out of some grandiose vision, but more of a deep, subtle struggle for purpose in a world where most get left behind. She wanted another kind of family, she wanted meaning, and she hoped that the Navy would serve her well as she served it.

In learning of her death right after Memorial Day, I've been thinking about how we honor veterans, especially those who have died - how we often raise up paragons of masculinity and virtue… men who storm beaches and raid terrorist enclaves. But there are many forms of service, and Suzzanna’s unique path and disposition on ANCHORAGE showed me that. Everyone’s service matters and in diversity there is strength. Everyone can serve his or her country even if they aren’t a Navy SEAL or barreling into harm’s way. Sometimes our quiet warriors are just as important as those leading the charge. What counts is stepping up and entering the arena.

And Suzzanna did that every day.

As much as Big Navy can grind up and discard us, the Sailor bond is not so easily broken. The hardest thing for me in writing this is that, with most Sailors being so young, the idea of someone from my division, someone who was alive and breathing and real when I was 22, dying, hadn’t really crossed my mind before today.

In the headlong rush of daily life we allow the banalities and stresses of the immediate to crowd out the more meaningful needs and relationships that define our experience on this Earth. This busyness feels right - tending to the garden of our greater needs seems like something for a later age - and so we embrace our youth and the idea that in the prime of our lives we should relentlessly chase the nearby, the gratifying, the self. For everything else there is time. Now, that rush feels hollow. With Suzzanna, and all of my other shipmates, there was time later. Time to catch up over beers in the future. Time to troll each other with memes. Time to be there for each other when life took us down a peg.

But for Suzzanna, there is no time. I’ll never speak to her again and that cuts deep. It’s making me tear up now. I never fully told her my thoughts or how much I valued her. Because… there was time. It always felt like there was time.

So, in that very human way, it takes tragedy to remind us of what matters, of why we are here. It’s not nice dinners, it’s not great sex, it’s not addictive video games, and it’s not stacks of money. It’s people. It’s relationships. It’s community.

For anyone I’ve ever served with, especially in my two divisions, know that even if we haven’t talked in years, you can always reach out to me. You have made me who I am today. Being a Division Officer was the greatest honor I've ever had, and I cannot imagine my life without you. As I leave the Navy in a few weeks, the only thing I’m going to miss are the Sailors. And I’m going to miss them, you, a lot.

I hope Suzzanna knows how much she is loved, and how grateful I am for her service to our country. And I hope you too know how much you are loved.

If anyone would like to send flowers or a gift to Suzzanna’s family, please message me.

From the bottom of a big blue heart,

Daniel