Our Story

Todd and I have had the honor of telling our story on several podcasts that you can access here:

For the written version in somewhat condensed form see below:

Our Story

Our story about our beloved Tristan goes way back to 1992, about 9 years before he was born. It’s a story that begins with the bible.

I met a woman in our church named Liz George who taught me how to study scripture. She showed me how to not just read it, but how to USE it. I began with the character of God and starting in Genesis and all the way through to Revelation I highlighted everything that talked about God’s character. What He said, Who He was, What He did. And then I penciled in the margin His character traits.

By the end of that exercise, the character trait I loved the most was God’s Sovereignty. Psalm 103:19 “The Lord sits on His throne in the heavens and His Sovereignty reigns over all” was my go-to verse.

God is in charge of everything down to the orbit of the tiniest dust speck. He knows when a sparrow falls to the ground. He knows how many hairs are on our head, He knows our thoughts before we think them, He knows our words before they are on the tip of our tongue. There is nothing that happens outside of His control. Back in 1992, God knew I was going to need that truth someday.

Liz also taught me how to set up a prayer notebook with a page for each child so I could pray over their life every day and have a record of answered prayers. This would be an important act to come.

Marrying Todd and Beginning Our Family

I remember praying, “God, you form us in our mother’s womb, you design us exactly the way you want us, so could I please have just one baby with blue eyes? And if I’m going that far, could you also add blond hair? With curls?” God said yes, and gave me my Tristy-wisty one, Exactly what I asked for. He had the hugest, bluest eyes, and his hair grew into long spirals of golden curls that hung down to his cheeks at one point because I never wanted to cut them.

I always reminded him of that throughout his life, especially in the dark times, “You are the boy I prayed for, Tristy! God said yes to your blue eyes and blond curly hair!”

Tristy became our Sunshine boy. He just sparkled. He loved to laugh, and bright sunshine seemed to shine from his halo of blond curls. He was so friendly; he’d just run right up to any kid at the park and start playing with them. We were a close family. Since we homeschooled, the kids were always around and they had the most fun times. My favorite thing was to take pictures of their kidlife to put on our blog for the family back home.

That’s why I knew the exact moment things started to change for Tristan. I have the picture in one of our yearbooks. It’s not that something snapped, or something flipped, it was just the smallest shadow I noticed that wasn’t there before. And over the years that shadow grew slowly until he wasn’t the boy I knew.

Mental illness runs in our family so I was on the lookout for what I thought that would be– a deep, deep, sorrow, or grief, or an inability to get out of bed and do life. But that’s not what happened to Tristan. He got more and more isolated and angry so that it was like he was a part of us, without being part of us.

Todd and I tried to figure out what was wrong and researched everything we could think of. Everywhere we took him, the doctors or counselors would just say, “It’s the teenage years”. But as a mom, I KNEW something was wrong and I began begging God to bring my boy back. Please show me, I know YOU know. Can you please show me? I prayed this starting in 2013 but Tristan just got slowly and steadily worse.

Without that answer to prayer, I prayed that God would give me wisdom each time I talked to Tristan because he was not very communicative. If Tristan was talking, I was praying in the back of my mind, “give me wisdom how to answer him”.

Answer to Prayer

In 2020, on January 21, God answered my prayer. Tristan asked me for help. He revealed that he had attempted suicide 8 times in the past 14 days.

I was shocked, as you could imagine. But there was something more – I was shocked that he was actually reaching out to me for help. He told me that he wanted to LIVE now.

The next 6 days were trips to 5 different hospitals and mental health clinics to get Tristan whatever it took to help him. I was his MOM and he was going to get all the help he needed and every single thing I could find for him.

We finally found the exact right therapist at the Shriner’s Hospital and Tristan was making progress. His session notes said, “It’s getting a little better”. With every doctor he met, he was saying, “I tried 8 times and failed. I want to live now”. He wanted to live.

Until Feb 8 when he didn’t.

That night he had gone with friends to a citywide worship service and the boys had gotten home after I went to bed.

Something woke me up at 3am and I laid in bed and began praying for Tristan like I usually did when I couldn’t sleep except this time it was different. The pain was so great, so great, like a sword was piercing my soul. I began begging and pleading with God to save my boy. But this time I asked using words that had never occurred to me before. I asked for a circle of angels to surround him, wings touching wings, with swords drawn, battling the chains that held him. I told God I would take his pain, “Could you give it to me to carry instead of him? Could we trade places? Please, save my boy, give him eyes to see and ears to hear, save him, please protect my son!!” It was exhausting praying like this, it lasted for about an hour. When I couldn’t pray anymore, I got up and made some tea and eventually went back to bed.

Todd was up about 7am and that’s when he found Tristan. He ran back into our bedroom and said, “Our boy, our boy, he did it, he did it.” and I ran out with Todd into the garage and held my boy, my beautiful, beautiful boy for the last time.

The commotion had all the kids awake and we circled in the living room and held each other and cried and I could only choke out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” I realized that at the exact moment I was wrestling with God to save my boy’s life, Tristan was out in the garage breathing his last breath. I was praying, and Tristan was dying, and I thought it was a cruel joke.

It wasn’t until later that day when the shock had begun to wear off that God gently revealed to me the true perspective. I thought about how much worse it would have been to have slept through the night and woken up to a dead son. To have known absolutely nothing about it. Then I was GLAD I was awake and praying for my son. Later that day we were able to find a digital footprint of his last hour and I realized that I had been praying for Tristan at the exact moment he was dying.

God reminded me that I had prayed for Tristan before he was born and I prayed for him until his last breath and THAT has been the greatest privilege of my life.

The pain of his loss was so great, that sword that was piercing my soul when I had prayed in the night had never left. I kept thinking, I’ve read about this pain. I’m going to read that passage about the sword that pierced Mary’s soul. At the same time, I was thinking, this is where it gets real. Either this book is a bunch of stories we tell ourselves to make us feel good. Just a bunch of tribal wisdom to explain hard things in life or, it’s what it says it is, The very Word of God that has all the answers. I mean, it doesn’t get any more real than this. Either my son is in heaven with God, or he’s just dead, and nowhere. So I turned to the passage in Luke that talks about Joseph and Mary bringing baby Jesus to the temple.

Immediately, I thought, this guy Simeon is seeing hundreds of babies every year. Every Jewish baby has to come to the temple to fulfill the Jewish customs, and how in the world of all those babies, could he have picked the ONE baby that would grow up to be JESUS and fulfill that prophecy? And that’s all it took to restore my faith and show me that this book is true. Jesus is who He says He is, God preserved the Truth for us to live our lives by. Mary knew what it was like to have a sword pierce her soul. I’m not alone.

Today

Two main things in the bible keep me from drowning. I have sorrow and grief, but not despair. I have a heaviness, but it’s with hope.

Have you ever thought of time as a created thing? There is a God who created time. He sees your life all at once. The beginning, middle, and end.

This is the first verse that comforts me when it comes to Tristan’s death:

“All the days that were ordained for me were written in Your book when as yet there was not one of them.” Psalm 139

I memorized that verse before Tristan was even born because God knew I was going to need it. Tristan’s life was always designed to be 18 years 363 days long. There’s nothing we could have done to save him and make it longer. There is no other page to turn. So I’m not mourning what could have been– university, career, marriage, grandbabies. There was not a single page left in Tristan’s book of life on this earth. I trust the God who gave him to me for that. Because He is all-wise and all good.

The other thing that gives me peace is that I know where Tristan is. He trusted Jesus as his savior to take away all his sin. So Tristan is in heaven right now. His pain is GONE. God answered that prayer, not the way I thought He would, but He took away all of Tristan’s pain. Tristan has a perfect mind, and a perfect body. When I think about wanting him back because I miss him so much, I remember the pain he had on this earth. And my happiness that God has finally healed him helps me not be able to hold my little boy again.

God answered another prayer, the one I asked back in 2013. What is wrong with my poor boy? We only found out the diagnosis after Tristan died. It’s called Major Depressive Disorder. It has 9 symptoms, you only need 5 to earn the label, and Tristan had 8 of them. I remember asking the doctor if teenage depression could manifest itself in anger and isolation, and he said, “oh yes.”

Now we know. God, in His sovereignty, did not allow us to know sooner. But I don’t have any “what-ifs” or “if-onlys” because I know that “God sits on His throne in the heavens and His sovereignty rules over all”. I begged Him to show me for 7 years and He didn’t until now. But I trust God’s timing because He is all-wise, and all-good.

God has a purpose for all of us. His purpose for Tristan’s short life on earth is not over yet.

Of course, my mother’s heart is sad. Of course, I miss my Tristy One. But it was not for me to say what Tristan’s life was to be used for, He was God’s all along. God has His purposes for Tristan, and I believe there are many more yet to come. “Thank you, God, for letting me love my beautiful boy for 18 years, 363 days, Amen”.