MARC LESTER / Anchorage Daily News Women snowshoe in Girdwood as part of a retreat for military widows and significant others.

GIRDWOOD - Cheryl Dodson and Ursula Martin trudged out of Alyeska Resort on snowshoes Thursday morning. They are best friends, they told me, as I watched them take pictures of each other in the snow. They came from North Carolina and Nevada, respectively. I asked how they met and Dodson turned to Martin.

"Tell it, Mama," she said.

Their husbands, Air Force Capt. Michael K. Dodson and Col. George Martin, died in a B-52 crash near Guam in 2008, Martin said. They found each other after that.

"For me and her, it was like instant love," Dodson said.

Their husbands were sitting next to each other in their last moments. That fact bonds them like family, she said.

I looked out ahead toward a line of women, 30 or so human outlines against the fresh snow in Moose Meadows. For every one I could see, there was a tragedy. A soldier, an airman, a sailor or a marine dead. Car accidents. Heart attacks. Suicides. Helicopter crashes. Small arms fire.

One hundred widows flew to Anchorage this week for a national military widows gathering put on by the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors, or TAPS. Alaskan Bonnie Carroll started the organization after her husband, Brig. Gen. Tom Carroll of the Alaska National Guard, died in a military plane crash in 1992. Almost two decades later, with two wars going on, TAPS serves about 25,000 widows, children, parents and siblings. This group of widows will be at the start of the Iditarod today. Several mushers will carry ribbons honoring their husbands to Nome.

Just after breakfast Thursday, I ran into Lindsey Rowe in one of the hotel ballrooms. Her husband, Air Force Capt. Jeremy Fresques, died on Memorial Day in 2005 in a plane crash in Iraq. In the dark period after his death, after the funeral and rush of attention from the military, Rowe's main connection became two women whose husbands died in the crash with Fresques. Then she found more widows through several organizations, including TAPS. Some women who were farther along in the process became mentors, she said.

MARC LESTER / Anchorage Daily News Lindsey Rowe plans at the TAPS retreat.

"To see women, oh my gosh, smile and laugh," she said. "To see it's okay to smile and laugh."

When your husband dies, dating can seem like a betrayal. Other widows in second marriages set an example for her of how to move on with her life, while still honoring her husband's memory, she said. She recently remarried. She lives with her husband, who is also military, in Eagle River. She's focused on having children. That was her biggest regret with her first husband, she said.

A little later I found Maria Sutherland, who is from North Pole, among a crowd of women gathered in their coats and sunglasses, waiting for the snowshoe trip. Her husband, Army Staff Sgt. Stephen Sutherland, was killed in a vehicle accident in Iraq in 2005. Like a lot of conversations I had that day, it didn't take long to get the rawness below the surface.

"Not a day goes by that I don't wake up and think about him," she told me. She thinks about him in the shower. She has shoulder problems and he used to shampoo her hair. Her eyes glistened.

They were going through the process of in-vitro fertilization before he died. And after he died, she decided to continue with it. Their son is now a toddler.

Kyle Harper buzzed through the crowd where I sat with Sutherland, directing women to the ski bus and the snowshoe fitting area. She works for TAPS as a program director, but she came to the organization first as a widow. She met Army Staff Sgt. Michael Hullender, when she was living in Girdwood and waitressing at the Sitzmark in 2006. They were engaged in 2007. A few months later he was killed in Iraq. She still wears her engagement ring.

MARC LESTER / Anchorage Daily News Kyle Harper, organizer for TAPS.

Years passed, people quit saying his name, she said. It was like they were afraid mentioning him would make her fall apart. Didn't they know she thought about him all the time? Other widows understand that feeling, that shift when grieving openly gets uncomfortable, she said. At a TAPS gathering, its OK to say your husband's name, no matter how much time has gone by.

Through TAPS, Harper met a small network of fiancees who lost their future husbands before they could walk down the aisle, their relationships unrecognized by the military. They coached her as she eased into dating again, something that sometimes still feels uncomfortable.

"I don't ever want to stop talking about him," she told me, sitting in a shaft of sunlight near the hotel lobby. "He was my first great love."