I just had to contact you to let you know how a grieving mother feels.
My husband and I were at the head of our son's casket during his viewing. After being there for about 15 minutes, a woman we did not know told us that she did not believe the article about our son on the front page of the Times-Union. I told her I did not know what she was talking about. I asked a friend to go get us a paper. She told me that there over 1,000 people here at the funeral home and thought it would be better to wait and read it when we got home.
In the course of four hours, we heard the same statement over and over. We are still in mourning for our son and do not have answers to his cause of death at this time. Let me take you back to the events that happened.
We were woken up by a police officer at 11 p.m. telling us to get to Kosciusko Community Hospital as quick as possible. Once there, we were met by a chaplain. I starting screaming, "Please not my Zachary." He had been brought back to life four times and was being kept alive by a respirator. They decided to air lift him to Lutheran Hospital in Fort Wayne. While driving, the longest drive of our lives, the helicopter flew over our car. We were outside Zachary's ER room and I heard code blue. They saved him again and I was able to go in his room.
I hope no mother has to go through what I did, seeing our son lifeless with no brain function and having a machine breathing for him. As parents, we had to make the hardest decision on letting him go.
He was a organ donor and gave life back to many people. He was the first donor from Indiana to donate a hand. A man can now go back to work and feed his family with a fully functioning hand because of my son.
I did not know a third of the people at the viewing, but we heard from strangers the wonderful stories of how our son made them smile or feel good. Many of the stories were from classmates that went to school with Zachary and how he always made a point to sit with them in class or at lunch because no one else would. Zachary always helped the underachievers. The wonderful stories from people we did not know helped us get through that night.
I'm not saying my son was perfect, we all have our faults, but he was just so full of life. I will some day have to explain to his son left behind what happened to his father, and I hope I have more to show him than the article that was written about him in your paper. It would be nice of the Times Union to write an article on the stories from people in the community that Zachary had touched and the lives he has saved by being a organ donor.
