My sister misses Mark terribly. So many hearts just smashed into pieces.  She spends a lot of time searching Facebook for pictures, for stories…she’s “Friended” many of his peers. She has the biggest heart I know.

After my basement time today, I went to my desktop computer to check on email and other odds & ends, and I got on Facebook and found she’d been digging again. She’d gone all the way back to 2012 on my timeline, in the process unearthing a post I’d made that fall, 3 long years ago, about a blog I discovered (probably culled from another Facebook friend) called An Inch of Grey.

The entry that had caught my attention that autumn day, three years ago, was from just a few weeks earlier in 2012…the blogger, Anna Whiston-Donaldson, experienced the sudden loss of her beloved 12 year old son, Jack, in a torrential storm that soaked our area and flooded creeks and streams. Jack fell into one of those torrents while playing with friends, and was swept away.  I was so moved by Anna’s brutal, searing honesty, strength and determination to share her story, Jack’s story.

Now, thanks to my sister’s “rummaging” and just a little over a month after my own son’s tragic and untimely death, I re-read that entry and then moved on to read several others…obviously now with a totally different filter. And I wrote to Anna through her website, just to say thank you for it all…including her most recent post about finding unqualified gratitude (i.e., gratitude that didn’t come with the “if only Jack hadn’t died” tag) again.  And I discovered she’d written a book – about Jack, about love, about loss, about God and the afterlife.  It’s called “Rare Bird.”

Thank you God.  Thank you Leigh.  I’ve got my book.

And Anna wrote me back. We’re having coffee soon.