I started writing this post yesterday, got stuck, and stopped. This is more indicative of the sad state of my writing mojo these days than I would like to admit, but I did finish this up today and am posting it, even though it's a day late. So pretend it's yesterday.

Five years ago today, my brother Aaron survived an IED attack on the Humvee he was driving in the Al-Anbar province of Iraq, where he was serving with the Marines. That whole story is over here. Every March 18 is important for our family as a day to pause and be thankful again that Aaron's life was spared. Five years seems like a long time, but when I think about how many questions we had that day, I can relive the uncertainty and fear pretty completely. Our questions were so basic. Was Aaron conscious? How long would it take him to get to the States from Germany, where he had been airlifted for surgery? Did he know what had happened, or would someone need to tell him when he woke up?

There weren't a whole lot of good answers at first. It was terrifying.

Sometimes I wonder if it would have made much of a difference on March 18, 2005 if the Marines who brought that news to our various doorsteps could have said "Your brother, your son, your husband, has been hurt very badly. He's lost his leg. But in five years, he'll be a law student. He and Kelly will have a son named Clark and they'll own a home and Aaron will be obsessive about yard work.You will actually joke about his prosthetic leg sometimes, and this will all seem normal. Incredibly normal." I am not sure we would have been able to believe that even if they had said it. The future seemed irrelevant and unimaginable in light of the immediate crisis.

But life goes on in five years. A lot. And all those things that no one could tell us that day are true now. Aaron is in law school. He and Kelly have a home and a dog and the coolest baby boy ever. As I was reflecting on this anniversary in the last few weeks it occurred to me that Kate and Clark and Isaac and all our family's future children will have no direct memory of March 18. How strange. That in itself brings up all new questions. Will we need to explain to the kids exactly what happened to Aaron, or will they always just accept that he has a prosthetic leg? Aaron and I have talked about that, but Kate so far seems not to notice. When she does ask questions I'm going to follow Aaron's lead, since lots of kids have asked him what happened to his leg in the last five years and he has worked out a way of answering them. For that matter, he's handled adults very graciously, some of whom are even less tactful than small children. These are weird little skill sets that most people don't have to learn. But all around, I like the questions we have now more than the ones we had five years ago. More surprisingly, they no longer seem unusual to me. They are just part of life as the family of someone who survived. We thank God every March 18 for the mercy and the privilege of being that family.

We love you, Aaron, Kelly and Clark, and are thankful for you and everything you did.

Fabulous blogging news alert: My sister Hannah recently started her own blog, which I am looking forward to reading every day. No pressure, Hannah! She wrote about this here.