When you help someone else how does that make you feel? For me, I get a warm, fuzzy feeling inside. It lets me know I’m doing the right thing. If I were to do something for only self-satisfying reason, there isn’t that good feeling that comes with it. You feel kind of icky after it’s all said and done and you’ve had time to think about it.

I always think back to Mari and her time in the hospital. On the day the “Doom and Gloom Squad” sat us down one final time to tell us that our beautiful little angel that we had been taking care of for the last 8 1/2 years of our life was forever gone; that she was only a shell of who she was before, we were crushed. I remember bursting into tears. The pain was so acute that it is indescribable to say how the strong the hurt is when your only child is gone and only living right now because of machines.

Mari’s illness was sudden and completely unexpected. I mean, how many children get diarrhea and fourteen days later are basically gone because they somehow caught an extremely rare form of E. coli called 0157:57.

In that very room where we are told our daughter is basically gone, the social worker told us about this guy. He volunteers his own personal time to come in to the hospital and take pictures of the family on their very last day with their child if they would like that. He doesn’t ask for one single dime from the families that are losing their child. He takes these photos in the background like he isn’t there. It’s to capture those last moment. I wanted that done and to this day I’m every so grateful I did.

It was a year after Mari did that I was finally able to call him and ask to see the photo’s. When we sat down and looked at them, they were priceless. He stayed in the background. We never posed. He was even there in our last hour with Mari as they had taken her off the ventilator. The raw emotion that was captured on our face said it all. That old saying, “A picture is worth a thousand word” is true.

This is a man who truly has a heart for volunteering. He simply ask for donations from others to help with the cost. And the photos he took are in a really nice photo album he gives to the family. Mine is upstairs on my bookshelf. And to the right is the very last picture of the three of us as a family about 5 minutes before she passed and made her journey to heaven.