Watching a loved one fade from thousands of miles away.

Editor’s note: The following is drawn from the words of recent Ben Jackson Foundation applicants. All names have been changed to protect applicant privacy. Quotes are preserved verbatim.

What does it feel like to introduce yourself to your own mother?

That is the quiet weight a young service member we’ll call Maya carries. Her mother has dementia. From her duty station overseas, Maya wrote in her own words: “Each phone call home is a mixture of hope and heartbreak. There are moments when I hear her voice and realize she no longer recognizes me. I have to remind her who I am, [Maya], her first child.”

She continued: “The pain of that reality is difficult to put into words. Knowing that I am so far away while her memory fades has been one of the greatest emotional burdens I carry. I long to sit beside her, to hold her hand, to remind her not just with words, but with presence, of the love we share.”

Stories like Maya’s come across our desks more often than most people realize. The applications are not abstract. They are written by 19, 20, 21-year-olds doing the math on a paycheck that won’t stretch to a flight home — and behind that math is almost always a person waiting. A grandmother in hospice. A father in chemo. A grandfather who served himself, now too ill to fly. Time moving in a direction nobody can stop.

One young airman applied because his mother was facing a life-threatening procedure. He had been there through her cancer diagnosis, her chemotherapy, her recovery—as much as a 12-hour shift on a Panama schedule allows. When the time zones line up wrong, he wrote, days could pass without a real conversation. Another applicant, stationed in Italy, told us his father was battling pancreatic cancer and undergoing research treatment at NIH because there is no known cure for his type. The flight to D.C. ran $700 to $800. He was already supporting his family financially. The math did not work. The math rarely does.

Another applicant simply wrote: “It helps me pay for a ticket to see my father one last time at the hospice he’s at before he passes from cancer.” One sentence. That was the whole application.

What strikes us, reading these letters, is how rarely the applicants ask for anything beyond the basics. They are not asking for vacations. They are asking for the chance to sit at a bedside. To hold a hand. To be in a room with someone who is leaving. One young woman simply wanted to wear her dress blues to her grandmother’s funeral, because her grandmother had told every nurse in the hospital that her granddaughter was in the Air Force.

A young airman from the Philippines wrote about her grandmother, who raised her while her parents worked. Her grandmother was turning 90, and it had been ten years since she’d visited. “During our last conversation,” she wrote, “she expressed her wish for me to come home for her birthday, as it might be the last time we see each other — but I truly hope that’s not the case.”

Another applicant put it as plainly as anyone could: “I would be able to see my grandfather for the last time. The doctors recently gave him less than 3 months left to live due to the cancer rapidly spreading through the rest of his body. I want to go before he is gone.”

A flight home, in moments like these, is not a luxury. It is the difference between being present and being absent for something that will never happen twice. It is the difference between a goodbye said in person and a phone call that ends with a dial tone.

For a junior enlisted service member earning under $25,000 a year, an overseas ticket can run $1,200, $1,500, sometimes more.
Applicants try to absorb that cost on top of bills, student loans, the medical bills they are already covering for the very parent they are trying to fly home to see. Many of them simply cannot. That is the gap you, as a donor, fill — one ticket, one reunion, one goodbye at a time.

Without donors like you, that hospice room stays empty. Without donors like you, that 90-year-old grandmother in the Philippines never gets the visit she asked for. Without donors like you, the dial tone is the only ending available. Your monthly support is what changes the ending.

Be part of getting them home. Any gift—and especially a recurring gift—helps. Start yours at benjacksonfoundation.org.