Our Story

In the early afternoon of May 7th, 2014, I received a call from the babysitter that would change our lives forever. Our three month old daughter, Zoe had gone down for a nap and never woke up. She had passed away from SIDS, while our two older boys had been napping upstairs with the other kids at the daycare. In a way, it is still almost like a distant dream, or rather nightmare, that we never thought we would have to live. Parents rarely think of having to bury their children, but we did, and others have to do the same. (Click HERE to read more of their story.)

The days and months that followed were filled with difficult moments. We had to make a decision, almost daily, that we would move forward. We had to choose to walk into the pain of those difficult moments, and in doing so, begin the process of grief and healing.

Typically, we try to avoid pain; it’s natural. Perhaps that is why most people say that the first stage of grief is denial. We don’t want to feel pain because it’s unpleasant and miserable at times. We didn’t want to feel the pain of losing Zoe, none of us did. It was a reality we didn’t want to accept.

However we needed to accept it. We had a new reality, that we would have to carry the pain of loss with us the rest of our lives. We couldn’t avoid it, we had to walk forward into that pain.

It was difficult, but pain is an indicator. It communicates to us that something is wrong. This is true of both physical and emotional pain. It is a message that causes us to react. When we touch a hot stove and feel the pain our first reaction is to jerk away. Emotional pain has the same effect on us, however we must respond differently to this type of pain. We must keep our hand ‘on the burner’ and allow ourselves to experience the emotional pain. In doing so, we begin to move forward and we become healthier. We begin to heal.

Rather than backing away from the emotional pain that we were feeling as a result of Zoe’s loss, we needed to process it and move forward with it as a new reality in our lives. We had to choose to walk into the pain, because in doing so we could walk through the pain and continue living.

It was God who helped us to see this as a reality. He was also the one who walked with us through the pain, into a place of healing; he continues to do so today. It is out of that journey that God birthed Hope Family Care. God wants us to walk with others, into their pain and through their pain, to a place of healing on the other side.

Someone once told us that losing a child was a terrible gift. At the time, that was a difficult statement to understand and even harder to accept. However, as God has brought other grieving families into our lives, there has been a connection with them that is indescribable. We have come to realize that that connection is the terrible gift.

God has used Zoe’s loss in our lives as a way to allow us to walk with others through the pain of losing their children. It is a journey that begins with death, but can bring hope and healing amidst the loss.

In July of 2017, we welcomed a new precious little girl into our family; Nora Jane Rollins. Her name means God’s Gift of Light; and she is every bit of that for our family.