It’s been nine months since I got “the call”…

Nine months.

I’ll never forget the moment I received word that my little brother was…gone.

NEVER.

“Penny. Penny! PENNY!” My sister kept sobbing my name over and over again on the phone, each time with increasing intensity.  That weekend, we had both been trying, unsuccessfully, to get a hold of Jay. When he hadn’t responded to our repeated texts or calls and his friends hadn’t heard from him, she decided to drive over to his house. Deep within my gut, I knew what she was about to confirm.

Her words paralyzed me in every way. I listened to what she was saying, but refused to hear the tragic truth: That our brother had barricaded himself in his bedroom, ending his pain the only way he knew how.

“No. NO!” I cried. “I don’t believe you. I’m not going to believe you! It’s not true!”

I curled up fetal on the floor, wrapping myself in the blanket my grandmother had sent me two weeks earlier.

“Wrap this around yourself when you need a hug,” she had said.

The crushing weight of my grief and sorrow was more than I could bear. I wept in anguish for the rest of the night…

As I would on many nights thereafter…

My journal from those first agonizing days contains one entry.

Nothing has been the same since December 11, 2011.

NOTHING.

But, while I never could have conceived it nine months ago, I am slowly coming to understand…

That the labor pains we must bear in death…

Are God’s passageway to birth new life.

“I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat is planted in the soil and dies, it remains alone. But its death will produce many new kernels—a plentiful harvest of new lives.” John 12:24

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