Connie Tourtillotte isn’t done crying yet. She might not even be done when her youngest son, Jason, comes home from Iraq this week.

It has been a year of tears and no end in sight.

“Holidays were very hard. And his birthday,” Tourtillotte said during a recent interview at her sprawling farmhouse in Orrington. “I cried a lot at night. The fear of something happening to him is unbearable.

“I could cry right now,” she said, smiling even as her eyes watered up.

Tourtillotte and her husband, David, haven’t seen their youngest son since a week before he deployed from Fort Bragg, S.C., early last March, when they traveled south to see him once more before he shipped out.

They were not able to see him off on the day he left for the war, but his wife, Pamela, an Army dental hygienist stationed at Fort Bragg, was able to see him just moments before he flew out.

“I have a feeling that it was a very, very sad moment” for the couple, who were married about a year before the Iraq War began, Connie Tourtillotte said.

She did not think she would have been able to stand the sadness had she been there.

Connie Tourtillotte smiled while relating how Pamela had washed all of her son’s clean clothes “so everything will be fresh when he gets home.”

She looked sad again when she remembered that her daughter-in-law refused to celebrate any holidays in the last year, waiting for her husband to come home.

They will share a spring Christmas this year.

Jason Tourtillotte, 22, was among the initial American troops who last March drove by caravan across the hot, dusty Iraq countryside on their way to Baghdad.

A senior radar operator for the 234th Field Artillery Division, Tourtillotte told his parents he never felt his life was in danger.

His parents, like so many other Americans – particularly families of soldiers – were riveted to the around-the-clock war coverage on most cable TV channels last spring.

Neither of them could turn it off.

“They show the same thing over and over again,” David Tourtillotte said, “but once in a while, they add a little something new and you don’t want to miss what’s new so you keep watching.”

Although the Tourtillottes had no idea where their son was in Iraq, they searched the TV screen for his face.

“We had it on night and day,” Connie Tourtillotte said. “Some people thought we were paranoid over it, but we had to watch. … I was looking over those faces to beat the band. A couple of times I thought it looked like him.”

She added, “I would rather see it on TV than sitting here knowing nothing.”

Tourtillotte left Iraq last week on his way to Kuwait on the first part of his journey home. He was supposed to leave Kuwait for the United States on Wednesday, and is expected to arrive home soon.

“When he left he was a boy,” Connie Tourtillotte said. “I bet he’ll come home a man.”