Tunbridge -- In her hands, Rose Loving still sees him.

Since John Thomas “Tom” Stone was killed three years ago at age 52 in Afghanistan, Loving remembers her partner in simple ways.

Now, she moves like him, and she adores history, as he did. Loving gave up the small drinking glasses she once preferred and instead sips afternoon tea from an extra large mug they nicknamed “Smitty” after he picked it up from a Smithsonian museum.

But it's her hands that really bring Stone back. To Loving, they look more like his hands than they do her own now, and in the garden or washing dishes at the sink, she looks at them and remembers him.

“Our hands,” she says, “were cut from the same mold.”

Stone, who grew up in Hartford and Pomfret and attended Woodstock Union High School, was killed by friendly fire, according to a military investigation.

But since his death in March 2006, Loving has found a way to remember him well beyond the traits that only she knew.

Working with a Vermonter who runs a small nonprofit that provides assistance to Afghanistan, Loving has raised in excess of $40,000 in the last nine months to build at least one, and possibly two, 10-room schools in the country where her partner died.

Donations from more than 100 people across the Upper Valley and well beyond have helped double Loving's initial fundraising goal.

“It just started snowballing,” she says. “It was a major shock to me.”

Amid her despair after Stone's death, Loving read Three Cups of Tea, the memoir of Greg Mortenson, founder of the Central Asia Institute, which raises money for girls' schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Inspired, she started looking for a way to do something similar, an effort that eventually led her to Jonathan Hoffman. He founded Direct Aid International, a Northfield, Vt.-based nonprofit that raises money and helps build public buildings in rural and often dangerous areas of Afghanistan.

At a fundraiser dance last September, Loving raised $3,000. Since then, kids at The Pomfret School and Dothan Brook School raised $1,200 and $700, respectively, and others have donated more than $700 through cardboard boxes, adorned with Stone's picture, at area gas stations.

At another dance in South Strafford on Saturday, Loving raised $600 more.

But the largest gift came from a private foundation, which awarded her a grant that matched $10,000 she has already raised.

Hoffman and Loving hope the money can build a school for boys and another for girls, but they won't know if that's possible until he travels to Afghanistan later this summer.

If both are built, they would be the ninth and tenth schools Hoffman has helped build in Afghanistan.

He says the towns in which the schools are built will contribute one-third the cost of labor or materials.

The Afghans, he says, will cover the construction, management and teaching.

They just need the monetary backing to erect the buildings.

Although he agreed to help Loving, Hoffman says he never expected her to garner so much financial support, especially in such a short time.

“That really is an extraordinary amount of money,” he says. “For her to raise $40,000, it shows the effort that she put in, but it also confirms just the strength behind Tom.”

Stone, Loving says, wasn't like most people.

“He was an incredibly wonderful person,” says Loving, sitting barefoot on her back deck in Tunbridge yesterday as the wind whipped through her sandy blonde hair. “Just a bright spot in the universe.”

In varied functions, Stone served the military off and on since 1971.

His devotion to the armed forces even into his 50s, Loving believes, may have been sparked by his brother's disappearance in Cambodia during the Vietnam War while working as a photojournalist.

Stone was deployed three times to Afghanistan with the Vermont National Guard from 2002 to 2006, and on his second trip as a Special Forces medic, he converted an old cargo container into a medical clinic where he treated Afghan men, women and children, who often lined up outside the makeshift hospital at 6 in the morning to receive treatment.

“He just had a way of understanding people,” she says. “They trusted him.”

Before his service in Afghanistan, Stone left his home at the time in Pomfret and completed an eight-year walk around the world.

And when people asked him why, Loving remembers: “He would say, ‘Because I can.' ”

In Russia, a government official paid him $1,000 to visit schools across the country and conduct physical education programs for young students.

Photographs Stone brought back from his trip often depict him standing, walking or playing with children, making the schools built in his honor, Loving says, fitting.

“He was a magnet for kids,” she says. “Someone said to me recently, it must be really incredible to make someone else's dream come true.”

Still, for Loving, who started dating Stone in 2000, her fundraising success hasn't swept away the pain of his death.

“I can never say it was meant to be, and it's OK that he's not here,” she says, “because it’s not OK.”

Eleven days before he died, at Loving's longtime request, Stone had a set of pictures taken of him.

Next to a window on the west side of her house, some of those photographs are mixed with others of the couple.

One photograph, though, has a special place in the home and in her heart.

In it, Stone is wearing a reversed, brown baseball cap with “ROSE” sewn into the side.

Loving keeps it framed on a table in her living room.

A small candle sits in front of the picture, and four sand dollars, which the couple found on the beaches of Plum Island, Mass., surround it.

Other reminders of Stone -- an iron-and-wooden bench where they used to sit and hold hands, or the way he would say “good girl” to her -- fill the moments of Loving's days.

“You start wrapping your life around that hole, and you start living with it,” she says. “I miss him being my companion. My buddy. … I miss that in my life.”

John Woodrow Cox can be reached at 603-727-3305 or jcox@vnews.com.