The darkness of that night began to envelop me.
And I lay there all night long just thinking,
How will we survive this?
Three words came into my mind.
They were three words that I remembered hearing
in a Church talk years before.
And in that moment of darkness and desperation,
those three words brought a light of hope.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
My family has a long-standing tradition
of gathering at Grandma's house on the Saturday
before Easter Sunday for a massive egg
hunt for all of the kids.
I did it for years when I was a kid.
And now I have the chance to take my own kids back
to join in on the fun.
Happy holidays have been happening at grandma's house
for generations.
The spring of 2011 was no different.
At that time, my husband and I had moved back to my hometown.
And we were close to Grandma's house.
We had four little kids, and three of them
were the perfect age to enjoy the Easter egg hunt.
The fourth, our little baby, was only 10 weeks old.
We gathered with the cousins.
We had a giant dinner.
We hid a ridiculous number of eggs,
and then we turned the kids loose.
Toward the end of the hunt, my husband
and I changed into our Church clothes,
put the baby in his car seat carrier,
and slipped out the back door, leaving the other three
children with grandma, the cousins, and way
too much candy.
My husband and I went down to our local church
where we had a special conference meeting to attend.
To be honest, we were really looking forward
to going without the three squirmy little kids where
we could sit and enjoy the meeting.
We got to the chapel without too much time to spare,
quietly slipped in and took our seats.
I was getting the baby settled while my husband glanced
at his phone.
He looked at the phone.
He looked straight up at me.
And he said, "We need to go."
I couldn't really register the words he had said.
It almost sounded like a foreign language.
My immediate reaction in my mind was, You're not a doctor.
You're not on call.
Why are you checking your phone like that
dictates where you need to be?
I couldn't imagine what it was that required us to leave
before the meeting even began.
But my husband was already on his way out the door.
So I grabbed the baby and followed him to the foyer.
When we got there, he showed me the message.
It was from my husband's father, and it
was about his little brother.
The text message simply said, "Troy killed himself.
Come now."
I'll never forget the hot wave of shock
that washed over my body, the confusion, the question.
Surely I didn't hear him right.
What did he say?
Troy killed himself?
Troy?
Brent's little brother who was 15
and a sophomore in high school?
Troy, the fun loving kid we all knew and loved so much?
Surely he must have read the text wrong.
I must have heard him wrong.
Somehow we stumbled into the car,
got the baby buckled in the back, and I began to drive.
This couldn't be.
We had just seen Troy the night before.
We'd been at a cousin's wedding the night before.
The night before, he was fine.
We were fine.
He was fine.
Everyone was fine.
Shouldn't it still all just be fine?
But as we made that 20-minute drive from our church
to my husband's parents' house, it
began to sink in that absolutely nothing was fine.
I've never seen my husband so upset.
I've never heard him cry like that and scream like that
and worry like that and just in sheer shock.
I just kept trying to focus on driving.
My job was to drive.
I'm driving us as safely as I can.
I'm just driving the car.
I caught a glimpse of my baby in the rearview mirror.
And all of a sudden, I realized what
must be going through my husband's mind.
His little brother Troy who was 15 right now in his mind
was still just his little baby brother Troy.
Brent and Troy were almost 16 years apart,
which means that when Troy was the age of our baby
Jacob in that backseat, Brent would
have been almost the exact same age of Troy the day
he died, the day he died.
"Troy killed himself.
Come now."
What kind of a text message is that?
Brent, the baby, and I were some of the first
to arrive on the scene.
We helped to call the police, fill out the paperwork,
and notify the other family members.
Brent took a few moments to go downstairs in the basement
to his brother's bedroom before the body was removed.
I stayed upstairs.
I stayed upstairs holding my own little baby, holding
him as tight as I could, thinking,
How will we ever survive this?
We will never survive this, not this.
There's no way.
I'm looking at this baby boy thinking,
How can we raise him and his siblings in this world?
How will my mother-in-law ever survive this?
Having lost my own father to suicide when I was 10,
I could think of no worst-case scenario
than to now be watching my husband, his parents,
and his six other siblings facing the suicide
death of their beloved baby brother, Troy.
My mom obviously kept the other three children with her
that night.
She made sure they were happy and safe and comfortable.
She made sure their baskets got left out for the Easter Bunny.
And Brent and the baby and I prepared
for a really long night at my in-laws' house.
Nobody was planning on getting any real sleep.
So we grabbed a pillow and a blanket
and just lay down on the floor in the living room.
The darkness of that night began to envelop me.
And I lay there all night long just thinking,
How will we survive this?
This has got to be the worst-case scenario.
All of these thoughts running through my mind,
all of this worry, all of this fear--just sheer fear.
Three words came into my mind.
Three very simple words started repeating themselves
in my mind.
They were three words that I remembered hearing
in a Church talk years before.
And in that moment of darkness and desperation,
those three words brought a light of hope,
something I could grasp, something I could hang on to.
Those three words were "Sunday will come."
Sunday will come.
As I lay there on that really dark and long agonizing
Saturday night, I kept telling myself,
Sunday will come, Sunday will come,
almost as if I wanted to believe that it were true
that Sunday had to come, right?
Sunday will come, right?
Somebody please tell me this night will end
and Sunday will come.
And then I realized which Sunday I
was waiting for as I lay on that floor.
It wasn't just going to be any Sunday
morning when the sun rose.
I was waiting for Easter Sunday.
Easter Sunday will come, Easter, the holiday of hope,
the promise of the Resurrection, the proof that God
can conquer anything we face in life, including death.
As I lay there in that sleepless night, I kept telling myself,
Sunday will come.
I began to remember more of the words of that Church
talk I had heard.
The speaker was Elder Joseph B. Wirthlin,
one of the Twelve Apostles for The Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-day Saints.
He had been speaking of the original Easter Sunday.
He was speaking of how dark and awful
the Friday of the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ must have been.
He talked of how desperate and lonely and scared and shocked
his loved ones must have felt on that Saturday when
they knew He lay in the tomb.
Think of His mother.
Think of His disciples.
Think of His friends and his loved ones.
And yet, the promise was there.
Sunday will come.
I began to cling to those words not
just that night, but in the days and the weeks
and the months that followed the funeral and everything else
as we tried to survive this, as we tried to put our lives back
together, as we tried to cling to the hope of overcoming
this hardship that seemed absolutely unimaginable.
I learned that we could survive this
because we could survive it with the help of Jesus Christ.
I learned that He would help us, He would carry us.
I learned that we could turn our fear into faith
and find the courage to take one step, one day, one week
at a time.
My faith was strengthened.
And I began to see myself, my God, and even my world
more clearly.
I'll admit I began to understand my own father
through a different lens.
I began to see his life and his struggles
with his own mental illness differently.
I felt as if a light had been turned on in my mind.
My faith was stronger.
My understanding was clearer.
And I became very confident that there would never
be anything God could not help me overcome because He'd
proven that in helping us overcome this one
day at a time.
Fast-forward seven and a half years
to another shocking Saturday.
My husband Brent, Troy's older brother,
also died on a Saturday.
He was 10 months into his fourth deployment
as a soldier when we found out he'd been killed in action.
Again, I spent Saturday in shock, thinking,
How did this happen?
How will we survive this?
I wanted to hold my seven young children as close to me
as I could, thinking, How will I raise them
in this world without my husband by my side?
My thoughts immediately turned to my mother-in-law,
my father-in-law.
How will they survive burying a second son?
To say it was a long day is a stark understatement,
but eventually it was nighttime.
And I got the kids ready for bed.
Once all seven of them were asleep,
I crawled into my own now-half-empty bed
and felt the darkness start to envelop me.
I lay there thinking, wondering, grieving, hurting,
and worrying.
How will we ever survive this?
And then in an instant, three small words
came back into my mind, the same three
words that had brought such comfort and hope to me
seven and a half years before.
The same three words: "Sunday will come."
Even though it seemed impossible for that night to ever end,
I knew Sunday would come.
I knew that at some point, the darkness of that night
had to give way to the dawn.
And so, when that horrible Saturday
turned into Sunday morning, I pulled myself out
of bed and onto my knees.
And I prayed a prayer of gratitude
to my loving Heavenly Father for the knowledge I have that
with the rising of the sun each day
comes a reminder of the love of His everlasting Son
in our lives.
I knew for sure that not only was Jesus
the Light of the World but that He would continue
to be the Light of my world.
I've learned a lot about suicide and survival
in the time that has passed since my father took
his own life when I was 10 and my younger brother-in-law
took his own life when he was only 15.
I've also learned a lot about heartache and healing
in the time that's passed since my husband was killed
in action when we were both 39.
I still love a good gathering at Grandma's house.
I still take the kids there the Saturday
before Easter Sunday every year.
I hide way too many Easter eggs.
And I let them eat way too much candy with their cousins.
But Easter is about so much more than just bunnies and baskets.
To me, Easter will forever be my holiday of hope.