The last time Sarah Keller saw her husband Bryce, she remembers the blue shirt and jeans he wore, and the look on his face before he went through airport security, a look that to her mind said, “I love you and I don’t want to go but I need to get back.”

Sarah Keller, 44, is not a military widow in the traditional mould. She saw action just as her late husband Bryce Keller did, and sooner in her career as a soldier. She had been to the place where he died in battle aged 27 in 2006, the White School in southern Afghanistan, where he earned a posthumous Medal of Military Valour for saving other Canadians’ lives.