StoryCorps is an independent nonprofit organization whose mission is to provide Americans of all backgrounds and beliefs with the opportunity to record, share, and preserve the stories of our lives.
North Carolina National Guardsman Tracy Johnson is an Iraq War veteran and an Army widow.
She is also one of the first gay spouses to lose a partner at war since the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell."
On Feb. 14, 2012, Tracy married her longtime partner, Staff Sgt. Donna Johnson. But eight months later, Donna was killed by a suicide bomber while serving in Khost, Afghanistan.
Harriet and Louis Caplan's love story began 20 years ago in a college town in Kansas. Harriet was 48 and working at a bank. Louis was a 56-year-old physicist.
Both assumed they'd be single for the rest of their lives — until their paths crossed.
It began with Wednesday evening outings when a group would meet after work.
"We went to football games and concerts, and I still don't quite know how it happened, but instead of going in two separate cars, you and I would start going in the same car," Harriet remembers. "I don't think we ever had a date."
When Bonnie Brown was pregnant with her daughter, Myra, she says she felt a mix of joy and anxiety.
"I hadn't ever been pregnant before," she says. "I never had really an idea of how to take care of a baby."
Brown, who is intellectually disabled, works at Wendy's while raising Myra as a single mom. Despite her disability, she says she never felt like her daughter was too much to handle.
"I think because I'm different it might seem hard for me, but I was going to give it all I got no matter what," she tells Myra, now 15, during a visit to StoryCorps.
When Bryan Wilmoth was in his late teens, his father found a love letter from a man in Bryan's box of things.
Furious at the discovery of a gay son, Bryan's father took him for a ride and dropped him off in the middle of the night with a $5 bill.
"That's sort of all I remember — sleeping outside in the country that night," Bryan, 50, recounts to his brother Michael, at StoryCorps in Los Angeles.
Growing up in a strict, religious household, Bryan and his seven younger siblings all became estranged from their parents over the years.
