“Days before my husband contracted Covid, I remember saying out loud to him how excited I was for everything to shut down; I couldn’t wait to have him to ourselves. How naïve was I? He’d be sick less than a week later, and gone a month after that.”
“Days before my husband contracted Covid, I remember saying out loud to him how excited I was for everything to shut down; I couldn’t wait to have him to ourselves. How naïve was I? He’d be sick less than a week later, and gone a month after that.”
“It’s just a stepping stone. A step away from the past. The past when I held him in my arms. A step closer to the future. The future when I have to let go. I can still see my little boy with his Spiderman backpack on his first day of kindergarten. I still see my baby on the first day he was placed in my trembling arms.”
“I see you all, meeting and greeting at a local coffee spot after drop off, pouring life into one another. I see you sipping fancy lattes and chatting about summer vacation trips you took, catching up like old friends. I see you, the ones I know from word of mouth who look my way, then right back to your cozy, familiar circle. Do you reminder what it was like to be an outsider?”
“When we lowered his casket into the ground, a butterfly followed it in, and flew out as soon as the casket was laid down. It was evident to everyone who witnessed it; he lived life so big, and he would live as big on the other side. And so began his larger-than-life journey.”
“I had not long turned 18 and was out most weekends having fun as you do at that age. That was until one night when everything changed.”
The Murrays welcomed six daughters over the last decade. But the couple received a big surprise earlier this month when, after the birth of their seventh child, they realized the baby was a boy.
“I woke up and cried for my mom. Here I was, a grown adult, and all I wanted was to see her. The nurses wouldn’t let me. I was in too much pain and they feared how my mom would react.”
“As I turned the heater on and drove home in the storm, I thought about all the people still at Target waiting on it to pass. How often do we let life’s storms keep us from getting where we are called to go? Sometimes in life, you have to get wet.”
“We had no cell service. There were no other vehicles on the road. We were alone, on a deserted highway, with our child who was quite likely dying, and we had no idea what to do. Nobody wakes up one day and thinks to themselves, ‘Today is the day my world will explode. Today everything is going to change and I’ll never get over it.’ But that’s exactly what happened.”
“I couldn’t eat, I slept all the time, I lost 13 pounds in two weeks. I really didn’t know what to do.”