B00AEDDPVE EBOK by Marie Osmond, Marcia Wilkie Page B

look in her eyes before: the look of not really being engaged in life, but merely existing in it. I had witnessed that look in my own mirror, when I experienced postpartum depression. I told my assistant to ask the woman to wait, even though I couldn’t really believe I was inviting this relative stranger to my dressing room. On most evenings, after the show and the “Meet ’n Greet,” I hurry to get out of my costume and home to my kids and my husband. But on this night, I knew I had to follow my intuition and hear what this woman had to say.
    There was very little small talk between us right from the start. She told me that she could no longer live with her grief over losing her teenage son two months before. She had come to Las Vegas, by herself, to end her life far from where her family members would be the first to find her. She had planned to go straight to her room once she checked in, but something made her feel like she should get a ticket to see our show. She thought it would be something to take her mind off of what shewas about to do. After the show she had been drawn to this side room where we were holding the “Meet ’n Greet.” Once there, she saw my executive assistant, a friend she hadn’t seen in two decades. This hadn’t been in her plans.
    Her son was seventeen years old and he had been out with friends at a party. The woman told me that although she never suspected her son had any drug problems, he had been found at this party dead of a massive overdose. The coroner had told her that the high level of drugs in his system had caused cardiac arrest. The look on her face now seemed to mirror the resigned anguish she felt inside. She had tortured herself endlessly, asking, “Why did this happen?” and “how” could she have saved him? Since there would never be a clear answer to either question, she had decided not to save herself, either. She had managed to gather enough prescription medication to go to sleep and not wake up. She had her room key and her bottles of pills. She was ready.
    I somehow knew that I needed to keep listening to this woman, at least until she felt heard and understood. I thought that I could empathize with her pain. As one of the founders of Children’s Miracle Network, I’d been with quite a few women who have lost a child to illness or accident. But you don’t have to experience it to comprehend the anguish. Any mother can imagine what it would feel like to lose a child. Most of us probably had the same thought as we held our brand-new babies for the first time: “I love this child so much, I will protect her or him from any harm, even with my own life.”
    As the night went on, I found myself in a silent plea to Godto help me know what to say to this woman, who was suffering so deeply. To my shock, it came into my heart to say something I would never say to a stranger: “Even if your son had survived the cardiac arrest and the overdose, he would never have been like your son again. His brain damage would have been very severe. Your son is free of a lifelong struggle that might have been much more painful for both of you.”
    As soon as the words were out, I almost apologized for saying them. How could I possibly know if that was true? I only knew that I had to be the one to say it to her.
    The woman became calmer as we talked and by the end of the evening, she promised me that she would go home and seek grief counseling. I gave her my e-mail address and asked her to keep me posted, and I had a late-night dinner sent to her room to make sure she knew I was supporting her decision to stay strong and go home to her family.
    About two weeks later, she e-mailed me to say that the full autopsy report had come back with the very conclusion I had told that evening without knowing why. The same drugs that caused his heart to stop working had quickly damaged her son’s brain beyond recovery. She wrote that I was a “mercy from a loving God.” Little did I know then the