Military kin coping with loss struggle with sudden gain

For some relatives of service members killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, the money feels, at first, like an affront, as if the government were putting a price tag on a loved one's life.

Others are thrown off balance by the sudden infusion of $500,000, spending with abandon to assuage grief or finding themselves besieged by hard-up friends and relatives.

And the newfound wealth often strains relations among in-laws.

Three years ago, advocates for military families succeeded in winning a significant expansion in survivor benefits, which include life insurance, a death gratuity, and assistance with medical care, housing and education. But the increases have left some widows and next of kin clearly rattled by the collision of mourning and money.

"It's like winning the lottery, and your relatives all look at you like you're a cash cow," said Kathleen Moakler, director of government relations for the National Military Family Association, a nonprofit advocacy organization. "Money makes people do strange things."

The parents of Sgt. Eli Parker of the Marines, killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq, used the $500,000 to finance their retirement, remodel their house near Syracuse, N.Y., and travel to Washington for the Marine Corps Marathon.

After Sgt. Dominic Sacco of the Army was killed three years ago by an insurgent attack, his widow, Brandy, fielded requests for cash from family members she had not talked to for years — as well as from her husband's ex-wife and a woman in prison who claimed Sacco had fathered her son.

Kayla Avery, whose husband was killed seven months after their West Point wedding, invested most of the payout, but not before buying new bedroom furniture, a Louis Vuitton wallet and a purple Coach bag to match her funeral clothes.

"I thought, 'Well, this is my husband's last Christmas gift to me,' " said Avery, 25, a graduate student in psychology. She lives in Tennessee, near Fort Campbell, where her husband, 1st Lt. Garrison Avery, was an Army platoon leader.

It is impossible to know how many survivors of the service members killed in Iraq and Afghanistan have struggled with managing the benefits, and in interviews with dozens of military families, only a handful were willing to talk specifically about how they spent the money.

Many families use the money to secure children's futures, pay off mortgages or otherwise make up for a long-term loss of income. But experts on military families say that they are seeing a growing number of problems, and that young widows — often naive about finance and easily seduced by the glamorous accouterments of pop culture — seem to be especially vulnerable, trying to somehow fill emotional gaps with material things and ending up in debt instead.

"When you face sudden death, and the death of someone your own age, you think, 'I could die, too,' " said Joanne Steen, co-author of "Military Widow: A Survival Guide" (U.S. Naval Institute Press, 2006). "All of a sudden you get hundreds of thousands of dollars, and there's a perception that it's going to last forever, but it doesn't. You're dealing with some really tumultuous emotions and unclear thinking."

$500,000

In 2005, the so-called death gratuity — the sum given to survivors for an active-duty death — jumped to $100,000 from $12,420, and the military's group life-insurance maximum rose to $400,000 from $250,000. Both are retroactive to October 2001, covering the nearly 4,500 service members who have been killed in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars since.

There are myriad other survivor benefits, too, many determined by specific circumstances.

Joyce Wessel Raezer, chief operating officer of the National Military Family Association, said a hypothetical widow of an Army corporal based at Fort Drum, in upstate New York, with three years of service and two young children would likely receive payments totaling $5,335 a month for the first year. In addition, a spouse would get free medical care for three years — the children into adulthood — and all would receive education aid.

Through private companies, the Department of Veterans Affairs provides insurance beneficiaries the service of a professional financial planner for a year, but a spokesman said that only one in 10 families uses it.

Bill Saunders, director of client services for the Armed Forces Services, a private firm based in Arlington, Va., that offers military families advice on such issues, said survivors are often overwhelmed by grief when they learn of the availability of financial advice and the military would do well to remind them after a few months.

"The money all shows up in their accounts within days or weeks, where there might have been $500 in there — ever," Saunders said, referring to the lump sum of $500,000. "Many of these surviving spouses are young, which means they've never done any kind of money management or investing. So it's completely foreign to them. It's like saying, 'Hey, would you like me to teach you Russian tomorrow? Come down to my office.' And they don't show."

Avery, the widow who bought furniture and a purse — but not the BMW she coveted — credited her financial adviser with pushing long-term investment, but said she knows some widows who are now destitute.

"I do know that there have been widows who used all the money by paying cash for a house and paying cash for a car," she said. "If they pay cash for a McMansion, they may not think about all the incidentals like heat and water and phone and cable and taxes and furniture."

One widowed acquaintance, whom Avery declined to identify to protect her privacy, ended up applying to the Army for an emergency relief loan after blowing through the $500,000.

"You have to have nothing — like the electricity has to be getting turned off" to qualify for such a loan, Avery said. "In grief, you're in such a state of shock that you don't take into account that you won't have your husband's salary in six months."

As they decide what to do with the money, survivors are often surrounded by people with their hands out.

"It wasn't even two weeks after I had buried Nick, and I had people asking me for money," recalled Sacco, a 26-year-old nursing student who now lives in Topeka, Kan., with her two children. "There were quote-unquote friends whom I hadn't seen in a long time who wanted to come and support me, but what they really wanted was money. It was pathetic."

Rifts with relatives

Though Sgt. Sacco's ex-wife's attempt to get benefits was unsuccessful, many survivors find themselves fighting over the military's money with other family members, and rifts often develop between the late service member's spouse and parents.

Rachelle Arroyave, 32, who lives in Northern California, learned after the 2004 death of her husband, Staff Sgt. Jimmy Javier Arroyave of the Marines, that his mother was the life-insurance beneficiary, even though the couple had two children and a baby on the way. Sgt. Arroyave's mother got $400,000, while his wife received $100,000 from the death gratuity.

"I never thought to ask, and I take responsibility for not making sure," said Arroyave, whose children are now 10, 6 and 3. "But it was my husband. Why wouldn't he take care of his wife and children? We had our whole lives planned out as to where we were going to retire and grow old together."

Research databases did not turn up a current home telephone number for Sgt. Arroyave's mother, and efforts to reach her through relatives were unsuccessful.

Because of such situations, in 2005 the military began notifying spouses when service members choose someone other than a spouse or a child as their insurance beneficiaries or if the member declines the maximum coverage. This summer, as the law changes to allow service members to designate the entire death gratuity to whomever they wish, the military will require a similar spousal notification (now, half the $100,000 gratuity must go to the next of kin).

But the hurt and awkwardness can cut both ways. Debra vonRonn, whose son, Sgt. Kenneth vonRonn of the Army, died in a bomb explosion in Iraq in 2005, said she felt the military heaped a disproportionate amount of attention on her daughter-in-law, who received the official notification of death and was provided a car and driver for the funeral.

"They were married for one year, but I had him for 20 years," vonRonn said. "I understand that the spouse comes first, but they really need to pay a little more attention to the families. What about the parents? What about the sisters?"

Regardless of who gets the money or how it is spent, the initial reaction to the death gratuity can be viscerally negative. As Steen, a Navy widow herself, wrote in her survivor's guide: "Some feel like they were paid off for their husband's life."

When Karie Darga's husband of 12 years, Chief Petty Officer Paul Darga, was killed in 2006 on his fourth tour in the Middle East, she received the first $100,000 within the first few days.

"My casualty-assistance officer handed me the check, and I wanted to tear it up and throw it right back at him," recalled Darga, who lives in Norfolk, Va. "It was almost like accepting the money meant truly acknowledging" the death.

But Donna and Renny Parker, the upstate New York couple who remodeled their house with the survivor benefits after their son was killed, said it has "been a positive thing."

"I don't think it's blood money," Donna Parker said. "I just wish Eli was here to enjoy it."