“I was a single mother of two boys. I was working overnights to...

“I was a single mother of two boys. I was working overnights to make ends meet. And I didn’t even have permanent residency, so things were very stressful. Every night I’d drop the boys off with a babysitter on the way to work. On that particular evening, everything seemed normal. Elijah was perfectly healthy. But in the middle of the night, I received a text from the babysitter. She said there was an emergency, and she was taking Elijah to the hospital. By the time I arrived his heart had stopped beating. He was only six months old. The cause of death was listed as Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. A few days later I collected the autopsy results from the police station, and I met the lieutenant who had done CPR on Elijah. He seemed very moved by Elijah’s death, but I didn’t think much of it. I was too overwhelmed by my own grief. I felt completely alone. Elijah’s father hadn’t attended the funeral. And there wasn’t even a headstone on the grave. The only thing I could afford was a small wooden cross. So whenever I visited the cemetery, I couldn’t even find where he was buried. It was like I’d lost him completely. For years I felt so guilty about it. It was such a weight on my shoulders. I felt that I was neglecting his memory, and that I would need to make things right if I was ever going to heal. Then one afternoon I received a call from a local reporter. He asked me if I was the mother of Elijah. And he told me that he was working on a story about a police officer who was raising money to buy a headstone. It was Lieutenant Jim Janso. The same officer who’d given Elijah CPR. The reporter arranged for us to meet at Elijah’s grave. Jim comforted me. He told me that all these years he’d thought I moved away. But he never stopped thinking about Elijah. He’d kept visiting his grave: every Christmas, every birthday, and every anniversary of his death. In that moment, I broke down. The weight of the world was lifted off of my shoulders. For the past four years I’d been crying to God. I was convinced that Elijah had been abandoned. But that entire time, all those years I thought he was lost, and forgotten, there had been an angel watching over him.”