How many of you have been kicked down by life?  Ever had your heart broken? Ever been hurt beyond repair?  What do you do with that pain? The answer is anything that will dull it or make you not care about the giant hole that has been blasted through your heart leaving you numb and kind of dead inside.  For many of you it is probably drugs, alcohol, food, sexual addiction. My medicine of choice was alcohol.  A couple of drinks and the pain started lessening.  Three or four more and I started to actually feel good.  The more I drank, the better I felt that is until the next morning when I woke up feeling worse than the day before.  This is how my life was until I found the cure.  Not just for my alcohol addiction, but for my loneliness and pain.

I need to back up a little and tell you that I don’t believe I was a bad child, I just acted that way because I was angry, hurt, and confused.  You see I grew up in a home where my parents were nightmares.  I lived in a house that had things happening I wouldn’t wish on my worse enemy.  I tell you this so I can kind of lay the foundation of where I am coming from.

When you are unloved by your parents, you will look for it elsewhere.  I did and that is how I ended up with a baby 3 months after my 18th birthday.  For the next 9 years I did the best I could trying to raise my son Danny.  I even married along the way, had another child, and eventually divorced.  I know that there are a lot of you out there right now who know exactly what I am talking about on any of these horrors.

After my divorce when my son Danny was 7 and his sister Jaime was only 3, I moved back in with my mom and stepdad.  I had no choice. And I drank.  And drank. And became more angry.  I wondered what I had done to deserve this kind of miserable life.  I contemplated suicide.  A lot.  I mean when your dead your dead right?  At least that is what my dad had always told me.  I truly believed death would be a blessed relief from the turmoil I lived with daily.

On Sunday mornings my son wanted to go to church on a bus that came by the house to pick him up and since I was ALWAYS hung over on Sundays I said ok.  He did that for 2 years.  I never thought much about it. On December 23rd, 1981, 5 days after my son turned 9, my world stopped. My beautiful little boy was diagnosed with cancer and we were told to report to Children’s Hospital the next day.

Now this is where my story changes.  Once he became sick, my son took care of me.  Yes you heard me right.  I know it should have been the other way around but it wasn’t. Just keeping it real.  Danny had peace and joy in the midst of sickness and all the horrible things that went with that, spinal taps, bone marrow aspirations, etc.  I fell apart.  Danny laughed and joked even through the pain of chemotherapy.  I cried and despaired.  And once again my anger was fueled.  It wasn’t fair.  I had endured child abuse, spousal abuse, addiction, poverty, unwed pregnancy, divorce, single parenthood, and now this.  How much was one person supposed to take?

31/2 months into his illness with all but two weeks being spent at the hospital, we got the results of my son’s most recent bone marrow test. His chances of survival were less than 10%.  As we got back to his room he looked at me and said “Mom, when I die I want to be cremated and have my ashes put on Mt. Rainier like Papa.” I told him we didn’t need to discuss that and he looked me straight in the eye and said “yes we do.”  Even in this new crisis Dan was caring for his mom.  I asked him Dan, are you afraid to die? He never even paused a beat before he answered “No, but I am afraid I won’t see you again.”  I asked him why and he told me it was because he was going to heaven and I was not.  I asked him why not and he said “because you haven’t asked Jesus into your heart.”  I told him I could do that but I didn’t know how. He proceeded to tell me about confessing my sin, and asking Jesus to come and live in my heart because he was the son of God and He had died on the cross for my sins.  He then led me through the nine-year-olds version of the sinners prayer.

I then asked my beautiful little boy why he was so sure about Jesus and how he could not be afraid to die. He said “because when I go Jesus is going to come and take my hand and take me to heaven Himself.” I said “how do you know?” He told me, “because He told me.” I asked him when and he replied, “the other night.” I asked him where and he said, “right here He was standing next to my bed praying for me and talking to me didn’t you see Him?” I could tell by the peace on my sons face that this was true because peace was a feeling I had never had and wanted so very much. I saw it on my boy and knew that it was real and that Jesus was the only way to receive it.

My son lived another 30 days after that. One week after he led me to the Lord, he was taken to surgery to find out what was causing the infection in his lungs that wasn’t responding to antibiotics. He came out of surgery and was placed on a ventilator until they could figure out how to get his lungs clear. They put him on a drug called Pavulon which paralyses you from being able to move. Not your limbs, muscles, or even your eyelids. It is basically a drug induced paralyses to allow the ventilator to do its job. The problem is that you can still wake up and hear what is going on around you, you just can’t move. I think about the horror and fear that he must have gone through my little boy when he first woke up from surgery that way. But then I remember the peace he lived with and knew that Jesus would be with him and protect and comfort him. I could tell when he was awake by his blood pressure and heart rate monitor and I would talk to him and explain what was going on, and sing our favorite songs to him, You Are My Sunshine, Annie’s Song, and Daniel. For those of you who are less than 30 look them up they are great songs.

We had signed a do not resuscitate order before he went to surgery as his MD (a wonderful christian woman I trusted) had told me that his chances of recovery from this current infection and cancer itself, were now less than 2%. I have often wondered how I could sign a DNR on my son if there was even the slightest chance he could recover? The answer is that I watched what he went through for the four plus months he was sick and just couldn’t see him suffer any more. The reason he had been put on a ventilator with a DNR order in place is that coming out of surgery, his lungs would not work on their own so it was just for 24 hours until he could wake up. Why he ended up on Pavulon was the judgment call of a (what I am sure was a well intended)  night MD who didn’t care what our wishes were. So, 24 hours on a ventilator stretched into 17 of the longest days of my life.  I finally told his primary MD that we had to do something and could she get involved (she was the head of the oncology clinic at Children’s Hospital and didn’t treat the patients that were admitted to the hospital)? She said that now that he was on the ventilator it would be hard to take him off but that she would do a bone marrow test and see what was happening with his cancer and we would go from there.

Two days later they removed the ventilator and brought him back down to the cancer ward. I laid in the bed with him and held him in my arms until I heard the alarm sound on the monitor and he was gone. It has been over 30 years since that day. I did have him cremated and rented a plane. I took him up and dropped him over the top of Mount Rainier like he asked my too. I know now that was his last job of caring for his mom because every time I see the mountain, I think of him.

As a result of my son leading me to the Lord, I lead my now husband, and then our kids became christians, and so on and so on. The chart below shows just how many lives were changed by one small, gentle, boy who loved the Lord.