Blankets in the Snow

When the first snowfall of the season blankets the ground, I think of Pam. Pam is a wife and mother of two. She and her husband raised their kids with lots of love and an appreciation for hard work and nature. When her daughter got married a few years ago, she used pheasant feathers to decorate the pews. But that’s not why I remember Pam each year.

Pam’s high school-aged son loved horses and the rodeo. One year he decided to try bronc riding. His first time out he was thrown and badly injured. Placed on life support, his family could only pray for his recovery. The phone call came in the middle of the night. Pam wanted to know what the Church taught about life support. The doctors told the family that their son and brother was never going to recover, and they had to make the decision to remove him from, or keep him hooked up to, the machines that were keeping him alive.

Sometimes I think she reached out to me not only because she knew I would tell her the teaching of the Church, but because I, too, was a mother of teenagers. Mom to mom, heart to heart, we cried for her son. And it wasn’t long after that call that we sat, Pam and her family and me, and planned her young son’s funeral.

When the first snowfall came that year Pam called me and said, “I think he’s cold under the snow. I want to take a quilt and cover his grave so that he’ll be warm.”

I think of Pam every year when the first snowfall covers the ground. For just a moment I see not a blanket of white, but the quilt of a mother’s loving embrace.