Bereavement

I have my own story. I have a jewelry collection that I sell at shows (I'm a jewelry designer) that honors my late son; half the sale price of each piece goes to IAVA, plus I also accept donations to IAVA.

A couple of years after he died, I was ringing up a customer at a show in Kingsport, TN, when my husband called me over to the display and said, "You need to hear this." A man standing there related that he had been hiking a trail at Bays Mountain that morning when he spotted something in the leaves at his feet. He bent down and picked it up and it was a $20 bill. He said he knew he was supposed to do something with it but he didn't know what, so he put it in his pocket and finished his hike. Later on he came to the show, and when he got to our booth and saw my collection for Adam and the jar for contributions to IAVA, he knew that was where it was supposed to go, but he wanted me to know how he'd come to find the money and he didn't know why. I knew immediately. When Adam was in high school, he ran cross country, and every year they had one meet at Bays Mountain. It was always a particularly difficult meet, and he usually came home banged up in some way, either from tangling with another runner, tripping over a tree root, or something along those lines. He had probably run that exact path, and that was his way of telling me, "Mom, I'm okay. Everything's going to be okay." I told the man that story and when he left after putting the $20 in the jar, he was smiling but wiping his eyes.