Gold Star Moms group helps local women cope

Gold Star Moms group helps local women cope with their military sons' deaths
Jul 4, 2012
Written by
Jennifer Bowman
The Enquirer

Six years ago, Vicki Dickinson’s phone rang. It was her daughter-in-law. “She said, ‘The chaplain is here.’ And I knew what that meant,” said Dickinson, a Battle Creek resident. “I hung up with her and I couldn’t breathe.” Dickinson’s son, Michael, was serving in the U.S. Army when he was killed in Iraq by a sniper in 2006. The 26-year-old was on his fifth tour and was supposed to return home just nine days later.

“You lose a piece of you,” Vicki Dickinson said. “It’s gone, and it doesn’t come back.”

Other Gold Star Moms are familiar with the feeling.

Emily Hansen, an Athens resident, said she was at work when she was escorted to the building’s human resources department in 2010. There, she was told that her 25-year-old son, Jimmy Hansen, had been killed on a base in Iraq while serving in the U.S. Air Force.

“I wanted to walk out the door,” she said, “but they shut it on me.”
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