As parents, we never forget the moment we first heard, “Congratulations, you’re going to be parents.” It’s a sentence that rewires your soul. You begin to imagine futures, to dream in color, to love someone you haven’t even met yet.
I was no stranger to sacrifice. As a wife, mother, sister, and daughter of warfighters, I lived with the quiet understanding that service came with risk. I knew what it meant to hold my breath during deployments, to pray through sleepless nights, to prepare for the unthinkable. I feared that war might take one of my children. That was the shadow I had learned to live with.
But nothing prepared me for the reality that it wouldn’t be war that took my son—it would be something far more insidious. Something that crept in quietly, without uniform or warning. Drugs. A word I never imagined would be written into our family’s story.
There are no parenting books for this kind of loss. No guide for how to grieve a child who fought battles both seen and unseen. No roadmap for how to keep living when the very heart of you has been torn away.
And yet, here I am—still breathing, still loving, still becoming. Not because the pain has lessened, but because I’ve chosen to carry it forward. To become the bridge between what was and what still can be.