DEERFIELD, Mass. -- The first Rhode Islander to die in the Iraq war lies among the roots of a great evergreen, in an old graveyard of slate slabs scoured by two hundred New England winters. The cemetery near his childhood home had once been his playground. He would climb the great evergreen to see how high he could get, before the branches grew too skinny and the view of his village, squeezed between the cliffs of Pocumtuck Rock and the serpentine curves of the Deerfield River, grew too awesome for a boy to climb any higher.

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Gallery: As Greg's death recedes further into the past, his family has been forced to leave him behind in time, stuck at five days past 24. To help remember him, they keep photos and things he touched.

He died five days after his 24th birthday, in August 2003, five months into a war that this week enters its fifth year.

The 285th American killed in the Iraq war was buried on a cloudy day. There’s a stuffed monkey in his casket, for the boy his parents remember, and a half-gallon of Berkshire Brew, for the man he had become. His grave overlooks the oldest section of the cemetery in this rural western Massachusetts community of 5,000 people, the home of Yankee Candle, a 2½-hour drive from Narragansett, where he had settled in his early 20s, and had become a Rhode Islander.

His name was Gregory A. Belanger. He was a sergeant with the 325th Military Intelligence Battalion, Army Reserve.

His mother, Kathy Belanger, remembers to tend to the gravesite three or four times a week. She scatters birdseed on the bare ground. Her son often has the company of mourning doves.

His father, Ed Belanger, lives 10 minutes down the highway. For 3½ years, he has kept a voice mail from Greg on his cell phone, remembering to save it again every 21 days before his phone erases it.

I first met Kathy and Ed Belanger on Aug. 28, 2003, the day we learned in The Journal newsroom that the first Rhode Islander had fallen in Iraq. To ask for an interview, I drove unannounced to the home Ed and Kathy used to share, where they had raised Greg, and his younger siblings, Allison and Jeffrey. Any scars from Ed and Kathy’s 1999 split and divorce were unimportant that day in August, and they greeted me with grace that’s still hard to fathom nearly four years later.

“I’m his mother,” Kathy introduced herself. “Have you eaten?”

The day after their son died in a bombing, they fed a stranger from their table.

Since that day 3½ years ago, a photograph of Greg has been tacked to a telephone pole near the family homestead.

It will stay there until the war is over, Kathy Belanger promises. “So people remember,” she says. “Not just remember Greg — but that life is precious, and whenever there is a war, this is what happens.”

Battered by sun and snow, the photo is fading, like an old memory.

Greg’s younger sister, Allison, who turns 25 next month, is older than Greg will ever be. She didn’t like passing her brother in age. “He will forever be 24 to me,” she says. “I can’t imagine him getting older, and I’ll never be able to.”

“He’s frozen in time.”

Since the time of Greg’s death, Kathy’s relationship with boyfriend Richard Emery, who met Greg just once or twice, has progressed to a full-time commitment. They share her house. Kathy has a new job as a day nurse at the Franklin County House of Correction. She just turned 55.

Meanwhile, Ed, a technician for a fuel company, and his girlfriend, Terry Goddu, have since combined his thousands of model cars with her collection of Coca-Cola memorabilia. They live together in Greenfield, in a house packed with display shelves and curio cabinets like a museum of Americana. He is 54.

As Greg’s death recedes further into the past, his family has been forced to leave him behind in time, stuck at five days past 24. To help remember him, they keep photos and things he touched, in albums and in little wooden boxes.

And they do things in Greg’s name, to make new memories that shore up the old ones and keep them strong.

HE HAD BLUE eyes and long, long eyelashes that the girls liked. He burned easily in the sun, and turned pink after a few drinks. His hands were so calloused he could take a pan out of the oven without mitts. He had been a high school wrestler. He couldn’t beat anybody at dominoes. Blue was his color. He liked sardines, beer, country-western music and The Simpsons. He hid his smoking from his mother. He was a rotten liar; the truth was always there in his eyes. His local buddies called him Gregor; Army buddies called him Bellie. He woke up foggy in the mornings. He answered the phone, “Hey.” He went to cooking school at Johnson & Wales, and worked as a chef, though he could have been a cabinetmaker on talent alone.

His blood was type A-negative.

KATHY BELANGER is potting a tiny balsam in a bucket beside her son’s grave for the winter, to be transplanted home in the spring. She seems comfortable in the cemetery, strolling the frozen ground, reading aloud the epitaphs from the early 1800s, and occasionally flinging a tennis ball to Bailey, her relentless black lab that fetches at a gallop between the headstones.

Staring into the great evergreen in which her son had tested his courage, she wonders how anybody could have gotten up there. The only way, it would seem, would be to stand on top of a nearby headstone for a boost. “I don’t even want to think about it,” she says, and smiles.

Kathy is a tireless storyteller, and one tale seamlessly flows into another. She laughs over the time Greg brought a Playboy magazine to fourth-grade reading day, and laments that the Army washed Greg’s scent from his sweatshirt before they sent it home to her.

She explains why she needed to view the body, on some ridiculous hope that the Army had made a mistake and had sent some other family’s tragedy to Deerfield; how she knew Greg had lost his left arm in the explosion before she saw it for herself, and how she just wanted to hug him, except that she understood how uncomfortable that would make everybody in the mortuary.

She spoke about her heart attack, a week after the funeral. She tells of the antidepressants she took for two years, and then of how she learned not to be selfish in grief, to climb out of selfpity, because she still has two children. Her eyes shine and she whispers, barely audible. She seems about to cry a few times, but she doesn’t.

Every August, around the anniversary of Greg’s death, Kathy holds a money-raising dinner for her memorial fund in Greg’s name. She doles out grants to college scholarships and small-town projects. She gave $2,000 for the neighboring village of Montague to update the town’s memorial to remember its veterans, and $500 to Frontier Regional High School, where Greg graduated, for a new athletic scoreboard. She hasn’t seen the scoreboard yet, but she hears that Greg’s name is on it.

THINGS AMONG Kathy’s keepsakes: one small American flag from inside Greg’s Humvee. A blond hair from his Army cap. His Purple Heart and Bronze Star. Dog tags, mangled by the blast. One answering machine tape from when he called home from Iraq. One tiny camouflage shirt from his childhood G.I. Joe. Photos of the Humvee he was driving, and of the crater in the curb where the bomb had been laid.

His autopsy papers.

AT THE END of a desolate one-lane road of mud and snow, past claws of blue ice bubbling out of the rocks, sits the Belanger family camp on the Green River, in Colrain, Mass. Ed Belanger’s grandfather, who had come to Massachusetts from Canada rolling logs down the Connecticut River, bought the land in 1928. Some of Ed’s oldest memories are of the family’s annual Fourth of July fish fry here, held the night of July 3.

“First time I got drunk was the 3rd of July, for crying out loud,” he says. “My grandfather covered for me.” His laugh is like an expanding chuckle he cannot contain, which pinches the words, and then shakes him like a rattle. When he laughs, his eyes disappear into slits. He’s stout, with a rust-colored beard.

If Kathy remembers Greg through stories, Ed remembers through places.

He wants to show off the camp, quiet in winter, buried under a foot of snow. The shallow Green River is just steps from his late grandfather’s ramshackle workshop, where they used to keep the still in the old days.

Memories of Greg are entwined with the camp: He’s a kid floating downstream on an inner tube; he’s a grown man tending the bonfire.

“You wonder what kind of grandchildren you would have by now,” Ed says. “You have to push yourself ahead. You don’t have much control over life, though you think you do.” Greg’s death changed Ed’s relationship with his other children. “I think I pay more attention. I try to make more of an effort to be in touch,” he says. Allison is training for a marathon, he reports, advancing the conversation into the present.

“I’M G00D. Too bad I didn’t get a hold of you … got your package. I’m good and everybody else is good ...”

Ed plays the voice mail again on speakerphone. If it bothers him to hear his dead son’s voice, he doesn’t show it. The call came in on July 3, 2003. Greg never called again.

Ed resaves the message for another 21 days. It’s his only recording of Greg. He doesn’t listen often, but he likes to know it’s there.

GREG’S BROTHER, Jeffrey, is 21, and has started working for a plumber. He volunteers with the Fire Department.

Allison was a runner at Roger Williams University 3½ years ago. Now she’s a traveling sales rep, selling orthopedic devices. She no longer dreads when somebody asks: How many siblings do you have? She says, “We have those moments now when we bring Greg’s name up and it’s just causal — ‘Remember the time…?’ I will deal with [Greg’s death] for the rest of my life. It makes it easier some days because you don’t have to accept it all at once, because it will be there forever.”

Ed travels all over the Northeast for work. He likes to stop at the Vermont welcome center off Route 4, at the New York line. There’s a memorial there for Vermont soldiers killed in the Iraq war. “I just look at the pictures. And think about the families who went through what you went through.”

The suffering that comes with choosing her child’s grave has made Kathy a better person, she says. She’s more compassionate now, more understanding. She thinks she may save a soul someday, working at the jail. An inmate gave her the best compliment she ever got. He told her: If you were my mom, I would never have been in here.

Gifts and notes still arrive at the house. Kathy received an exquisite homemade quilt from a long-ago neighbor in Colorado, who said she had recently learned of the death of “the little boy in cowboy boots across the street.” How lovely, Kathy remarked, that she remembered.

marsenau@projo.com