Finding Peace After Loss

The call came early in the afternoon. It was my youngest son, Shane. “Mama something’s wrong with Chris. He’s still asleep and he’s breathing funny.”

“I’m on my way!” I told him as I rushed out the door. I yelled to my husband, “Something’s wrong. I’m going to check on Chris.”

I arrived at their apartment within minutes, I rushed up the stairs in to the front room only to find my son and a friend of his placing Chris on the floor, telling me he wasn’t breathing.

I screamed for them to call 911 as I threw my purse and keys aside and began CPR on my son.

In total disbelief of what was happening, I, a nurse and a CPR instructor, was now trying to save my own son’s life.

I remember begging him during the chest compressions and tears, “Son, please don’t leave me!”

Finally, paramedics arrived to take over with advanced life support and gained what would only be a faint pulse. We met up at the hospital and waited for hours as staff diligently worked to try to save my precious young son.

Finally they came to us. He had been placed on life support and they had done all they could do. His vital organs had already began to shut down.

We went to his bedside and prayed for hours and hours. I watched as the life of my precious son faded away before the decision came down to removing all the support machinery. It was the hardest decision a mother will ever have to make.

When he stopped breathing, a tear fell from his eye and down the side of his face. We all began to cry, not knowing what to think. And emptiness and loss came over me that I cannot begin to explain. The pain was so incredible that I just wanted to die.

How in the world could my son be dead at the age of 25? Why, God? Why?

How would I go on living? How would I tell his son his daddy was gone?

I was absolutely numb for almost two years. This young man and his little boy had been my life.

Everything I did every day of my life revolved around them. I didn’t know how to move on from here. What now, God?

A friend of Chris’s invited me to church – the same church he had been saved at just months prior to his death – and I accepted.

Something extraordinary happened when I entered those doors that day.

Something came over me that I cannot explain. I felt a wash of peace come through my entire body while I sat in that church. I couldn’t hear the preacher’s sermon or the people talking. All I could hear was an angel-like choir so incredibly soft, and all I could see was a light so bright, yet filtered as not to blind my eyes. I felt the burden of a weight taken off of me for the first time since my son had died.

I felt like I must have been drugged. I thought it impossible to feel this wonderful. For the first time in so long, I was at peace and God assured me I would be all right.

I have found my peace with God, I still miss my son, but now I know I will see him once again.