Widow was face of war’s grief Woman killed by father lent empathy to others mourning soldiers

PORTLAND – She stood next to widows at the graves of soldiers who had gone to Iraq to fight with her husband – a young Romanian woman who lost her one true love and became the face of a grieving homeland in the aftermath.

Lavinia Gelineau attended those funerals always clutching a bright pink teddy bear her husband had given her on Valentine’s Day before he deployed. She cried and could have blended in among the black-clad mourners. But her intense brown eyes hinted at the intensely personal reason for coming: Their agony was hers.

“She was so passionate about reaching out to the other people who had lost loved ones. She wasn’t trying to say it’s all right, you’ll get better. She just wanted to share their grief and acknowledge the fact that they had lost someone so important. Because she had, too,” said her mother-in-law, Victoria Chicoine.

This story that began in tragedy sadly ended last week. Less than a year after her 23-year-old husband died in Iraq, Lavinia’s estranged father brutally strangled her with a rope in her Westbrook home before hanging himself. She will be buried on Saturday alongside her husband in Portland.

Police have said Gelineau’s parents had a history of domestic violence in Romania, and she had voiced concerns about her safety to friends before she agreed to allow her father to visit her at her new home in Maine.

But those preparing for her funeral haven’t thought about that. Instead, they’ve returned to memories of a storybook marriage of two young students who met by happenstance at the University of Southern Maine, the unexpected death of Spc. Christopher Gelineau that tore them apart, and the devotion between them that inspired all they touched.

Gelineau was one of four soldiers from the Maine National Guard’s 133rd Engineering battalion who were injured when an improvised explosive device detonated on a highway outside Mosul. Insurgents opened small arms fire in the ambush, and a U.S. medevac helicopter was sent for the wounded soldiers.

Gelineau, who grew up in Starksboro, Vt., but lived in Portland, died on April 20, 2004, while waiting for the helicopter to arrive. He was the 100th U.S. soldier to die during one of the war’s deadliest months.

About 400 students and guardsmen came to his funeral service at the university’s gymnasium. The ceremony culminated with Lavinia picking up a guitar and singing an emotional version of Richard Marx’s “Right Here Waiting.”

It was the couple’s song, and in the months that followed, Lavinia would send e-mails to friends with a verse from the song pasted next to “L & C Forever.”

Lavinia, 25, had come to USM on a scholarship and began dating the baby-faced technology student from Vermont after he fixed her computer. The two found themselves in a passionate romance that swept them to the altar in April 2002.

It was a marriage to envy, said Margaret Reimer, an English professor who taught both while they were students and developed a relationship with Lavinia after Chris deployed, often meeting with the young bride turned pale with worry.

Her fears became reality when Gelineau was killed just weeks away from the couple’s wedding anniversary. He was the first Maine National Guard soldier killed in Iraq, and his death scarred his wife waiting for him at home.

Reimer remembers the palpable sadness at Gelineau’s wake last April, when Lavinia stretched out along the length of her husband’s coffin, rested her head on the cold metal and wept.

“I was looking at what it truly meant to have your heart break,” she said.

Lavinia visited the cemetery sometimes twice a day in the months that followed to sit by the heart-shaped granite marker bearing the couple’s names and a poem written about their visits to Lake Champlain in Vermont, where they watched sailboats. She spent hours there clearing snow with a shovel and scraping away ice with her bare hands.

These quiet moments of reflection were often shared in her e-mails.

“I knelt with one knee only and looked at the photos of Chris and me that I had placed in the display case,” she wrote a month before her death. “Two beautiful young people who were gonna show the world what true love is. Two people who were gonna grow old together and still walk hand in hand.”

Lavinia bought a house not far from the cemetery and told many she would never be happy again. Her desk at work was covered with pictures of her husband, and she always wore a button with a photo of the young, smiling soldier on her chest.

The year after his death became an up-and-down struggle for Lavinia to come to peace with her husband’s absence, those who knew her best say. She frequently visited her in-laws in Vermont and turned into an outspoken critic of U.S. policy in Iraq, which has taken more than 1,500 U.S. lives to date.

When she died, she was just beginning to move on with her life, however affected it was, her counselor said.

“She felt that the two of them were as one. She more than lost a partner when he died, she lost a part of herself,” said Andy Gibson, the Maine National Guard chaplain who met with Lavinia frequently after Chris died.

Lavinia and her mother-in-law had visited cemeteries in Vermont to leave flowers and notes on the graves of fallen soldiers. Chicoine said the two forged a bond as they worked together on finding a peace amid their lost hopes.

The 133rd was Maine’s largest Reserve unit, deploying to Iraq one month before Gelineau was killed. All of the more than 500 soldiers in the unit now have returned home.