Coming home has never been so bittersweet for Patty
Gutierrez.
The wife of fallen Army Staff Sgt. David H. Gutierrez, her three
young sons and her 80-year-old mother are in the hectic process of
moving their lives from Fort Lewis in Washington state to
Gilroy.
Coming home has never been so bittersweet for Patty Gutierrez.
The wife of fallen Army Staff Sgt. David H. Gutierrez, her three young sons and her 80-year-old mother are in the hectic process of moving their lives from Fort Lewis in Washington state to Gilroy.
“If he were still here, we wouldn’t be here,” Gutierrez said of her husband, 35, who died in Afghanistan on Christmas Day 2009, killed by a roadside bomb. Though they have many ties to Silicon Valley, Gilroy was not where she and her husband planned to end up, she said.
The youngest of nine children, Gutierrez has family scattered around the Bay Area. Her husband’s family is also concentrated in California, and his parents were raised in Gilroy and married at St. Mary’s Church. The couple lived in Hawaii for several years before being stationed at Fort Lewis in October 2006.
“The boys are getting used to being here. They’re getting used to the sun,” she said – a smile in her voice – of Andrew, 12, Jeremiah, 6, and Gabriel, 4. “They’re settling in a lot better than I had expected.”
Gutierrez’s sons, who bear a striking resemblance to their father, will start school at Ascencion Solorsano Middle and Las Animas Elementary schools in August, Gutierrez said. For the summer, Gutierrez will focus on getting their one-story home in west Gilroy in shape. Though she and her family had made several trips to Gilroy since she buried her husband at the Gavilan Hills Memorial Park in north Gilroy this past January, she arrived Friday night for good.
“It’s been nonstop visitors all weekend,” she said over the phone Monday morning as her sons still slept. “I feel like I have to go away to sleep.”
Still without the cars that were supposed to be delivered over the weekend, Gutierrez is also waiting for the majority of her family’s furniture and other belongings to arrive.
“All I can do is sit and wait,” she said, a skill she mastered during her husband’s deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.
Even though she hasn’t yet had a chance to meet many neighbors or explore her new town, Gutierrez could probably make it to her husband’s grave with her eyes closed. During Memorial Day weekend alone, she visited the tidy plot at least 10 times to clean it and share a few words with her husband. She last spoke with him via a web camera and instant messaging the night of Dec. 23. Two days later, her husband was on dismounted patrol in Howz-e Madad when he was killed by an improvised explosive device, according to the Department of Defense.
Next month, Gutierrez will head back to Washington for a visit. By that time, many of her husband’s friends will be returning from their tour in Afghanistan and she will join their wives – the women she learned to lean on in times of need – for their homecoming.
“I love being back here and I missed my friends to death,” Gutierrez said. “But they don’t understand me. I’ll be throwing out acronyms and they have no clue what I’m talking about.”
In times like those, Gutierrez makes a beeline for the phone or Facebook to get in touch with her fellow Army wives. “I miss you guys,” she tells them.
Back in the Bay, Gutierrez hopes to take her sons to some of her and her husband’s favorite haunts.
“I’m dying to take Andrew to Winchester,” she said of the famed Mystery House in San Jose.
She remembered the house’s extravagant mazes with fondness. Armed with a flashlight, her husband ushered her through the winding labyrinth on one of their first dates.
More than a decade ago, the couple met at a sports bar called San Jose Live. David Gutierrez, then a young bouncer, kept his future wife waiting in the cold to scrutinize her I.D. and flirt with her, she remembered. The two were married 13 years.
After a decade away from the area, Gutierrez returned to find that many of her old hangouts had closed. But Happy Hollow, a park and zoo in San Jose, also tops her to-see list.
“I’m excited to take my boys,” she said “When I was a teenager, I used to have to take my nieces and nephews. Now I have my own kids.”
This weekend, Gutierrez said she hopes to celebrate July 4 at Gilroy’s fireworks show. In the meantime, adjusting to her new life will take some time.
“It’s a whole different world out there that either makes you or breaks you,” she said as her sons sleepily filed into the kitchen, asking their mother for breakfast.
