Father: ‘Each day is a battle. That’s what it is.’
On first Memorial Day since son’s death, he’s still figuring out how to move forward
The safe was the last of his son’s things that Darrold Martin opened.
The Halethorpe man found Xavier Martin’s passport and credit card. And a copy of “There is Greatness Within You, My Son,” a well-thumbed book of poems his father bought him at a Cracker Barrel.
Darrold Martin cried at the realization that the old book was one of his son’s prized possessions.
“Everything I gave him has come back to me,” he said.
Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Xavier Martin had risen quickly through the ranks. He was serving aboard the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer USS Fitzgerald last June when it collided with a container ship near Japan.
Martin was one of seven sailors killed. He was 24. The incident remains the subject of a contentious investigation and military prosecution.
Today is the first Memorial Day since Xavier’s death. Darrold Martin, himself a Navy veteran, plans to join family members of some of the five other service members
with Maryland ties who were killed in the last year at the Memorial Day ceremony at the Dulaney Valley Memorial Gardens in Timonium.
That’s the most service members honored at the annual ceremony since 2013. They include two sailors killed in another collision, and a soldier killed during a bungled counter-terrorism mission in Niger
Martin, who works for a defense contractor, has long understood the meaning of Memorial Day. But this year he knows it’s going to be different.
“It’s coming,” he said, “the emotion. I’ll deal with it when it comes.”
In the months since his son’s death, Martin said, it’s as if he’s been seeing the world through glasses smudged with fingerprints. All the crispness is gone, and he’s still figuring out how to piece his own life back together.
Sometimes, Martin said, he gets up and gets ready for work only to pause and get back under the covers. Intense grief hits him unexpectedly, bringing on tears that pass almost as quickly as they arrive.
“Each day is a battle,” Martin said. “That’s what it is.”
While the sadness can be debilitating, Martin said he’s worried about losing the pain, because it might mean he’s forgetting his son.
And so Martin has inked the memory into his skin.
His son’s dog tag and the coordinates of the collision are tattooed on one arm. On the other is a representation of the soundwaves from the last voicemail Xavier sent him. He can scan that one with his phone to play the message. Xavier’s voice comes cheerily out of his phone speaker.
Solace also came early on from a friend Xavier made when he was based in Guam.
Cristina Dunstan was one of a group of four older women who became like surrogate sisters to Xavier, an only child whom Martin raised by himself.
After the collision, Dunstan said, she combed desperately through Facebook to find Darrold Martin. She’d spoken to him briefly on the phone once. Eventually a high school friend of Xavier’s made the connection.
The first time they got on the phone, Dunstan said, she felt comforted: “We didn’t really talk. I just cried.”
Other calls followed, sometimes for hours late into the night, in the weeks after Xavier died.
“We relied on each other for that whole first month,” Martin said.
Dunstan visited Baltimore for Xavier’s funeral in July. He was buried the following month at Arlington National Cemetery.
Then in the fall Xavier’s effects began arriving, giving Martin a chance to see the man his son had become since joining the Navy as a teenager and heading overseas.
“His whole world fell into my lap,” Darrold Martin said.
First was a box of mail containing a speaker system Xavier wanted to install in the yellow right-hand drive Mazda sports car that now sits on his father’s driveway. Xavier’s records showed that at 24 he already had thousands of dollars in a savings acccount and thousands more set aside for retirement.
“I was just so impressed about how he turned out,” his father said.
Martin has formed a network with the families of the other sailors killed in the collision, and those of 10 sailors who died two months later on the USS John S. McCain. Two of them, Timothy Eckels Jr. and Kevin Bushell, were from Maryland.
This month, Martin and some of the other families attended hearings at the Navy Yard in Washington, where criminal cases against four officers accused of wrongdoing in the crash — including the Fitzgerald’s captain — are being heard.
Lt. j.g. Sarah Coppock has pleaded guilty to dereliction of duty. Martin said he approached her after the hearing and asked to talk. Martin said he stepped into an empty office with her lawyer, opened his arms, hugged her, kissed her forehead and put Xavier’s dog tag around her neck.
Martin said he doesn’t blame the sailors who have been charged by the Navy — he says they’ve been scapegoated for much wider failings by the military that led to several collisions the Pacific last year.
Martin, who once worked for a company that helped design the Arleigh Burke class of destroyers, is hoping to use his service and contracting experience to ensure the Navy makes changes and supports the sailors from the Fitzgerald who survived.
“I know what I’m going through, I can’t imagine what these kids are going through,” he said. “I’ve become a real activist for the saliors that were left.”
Martin has woven a web to support himself as he continues to grieve, but it’s a web with a hole right through the middle.
The feeling of Xavier’s presence doesn’t come to Martin as often as he thought it would. In the two dreams he’s had about his son, he’s trying to reach him but can’t.
Twice a month Martin goes to his son’s gravesite at Arlington National Cemetary. He struggles to get any rest at night. But at Xavier’s final resting place, he feels soothed and often drifts off to sleep.