I have seen someone die twice.
The first time was a five-year-old boy at a city pool in Jacksonville.
I was one of several lifeguards on duty that day. The boy had come to the pool with his older sister while his mother visited a friend across the street. During a break, he moved toward a corner of the pool and somehow ended up clinging to the bottom bars of a ladder. From where I was sitting near the shallow end, he was hidden just to my left.
I did not see him at first.
Another lifeguard, Darius, was on the stand near the deep end. He saw the boy resurface after losing his grip and going under. What I remember next is Darius swimming toward that corner like an Olympian.
I ran down the deck, and together we got the boy out of the water and onto the concrete.
He was unresponsive.
We started CPR immediately. The scene was frantic, desperate and terrible in ways I will never forget. Every person there did what he had been trained to do. The paramedics arrived quickly — probably within five minutes — though it felt much longer.
But the sound I remember most was not the siren.
It was his mother.
Several men were holding her back as she screamed, “My baby’s not moving!”
That sentence has never left me.
We were sent home for the day. I had recently been named student editor of the FCCJ Campus Voice, so I drove to the downtown campus, went into my office, crawled under the desk and sobbed. A friend who had helped me get the lifeguarding job found me there, held me and told me everything was going to be OK.
I am not sure I believed her.
Years later, I went back to that same pool with my school’s swim team for a meet. Time had passed. I was older. Life had moved on in all the ways life insists on moving on. But standing there, I could still see everything.
I could see the corner of the pool. I could see where Darius had been. I could see the house across the street where the mother had been visiting.
Some memories do not fade. They wait.
The second time I saw someone die, it was my mother.
That death was different. It was not sudden. It was not frantic. It came after breast cancer had ravaged her body until she was almost beyond recognition. My family sat around her bed as she breathed her last.
The night before, we had sung worship songs to her. Now we sat quietly, praying for the Lord to end her suffering and take her home.
There was nothing to do but love her, pray and let go. That may be one of the hardest kinds of strength there is.
Earlier this year, I watched Daryl’s family walk through much the same valley as dementia finally claimed her mother, Anne. Again, there was the waiting. The praying. The grief. The strange mixture of sorrow and mercy that comes when death is terrible, but continued suffering would be terrible, too.
And this year, I have watched a friend at school wade through life after the sudden loss of her husband. She is not pretending it does not hurt. She is not skipping past grief. She is simply doing the brave, brutal work of living one day at a time.
Maybe that is where the answer to the question finally begins.
The question asks, “What’s a moment that made you realize you were stronger than you thought?”
I do not think the moments themselves made me feel strong.
At the pool, I did not feel strong. I felt helpless.
At my mother’s bedside, I did not feel strong. I felt broken.
Strength came later.
Strength was getting up afterward. Strength was going back to work. Strength was loving people again after being reminded how fragile they are. Strength was returning to places where grief had left fingerprints. Strength was carrying memories that still sting without letting them turn my heart to stone.
Death is final in a way that nothing else is. There is a before, and there is an after. You do not get to bargain with it. You do not get to rewrite it. You do not get to make it less cruel by explaining it well.
But the victory, if there is one, is that death does not get the last word over everything.
My mother would not have wanted us to shut down from the pain of losing her. She would have wanted us to carry forward the lessons she tried to teach us. She would have wanted us to live as people shaped by love, not paralyzed by loss.
That does not mean grief disappears. It does not mean the memories stop hurting. It does not mean we become strong in some movie-version way, standing tall while dramatic music plays in the background.
Sometimes strength looks like driving to an office, crawling under a desk and crying until there are no tears left.
Sometimes strength looks like sitting beside a hospital bed and praying the prayer you never wanted to pray.
Sometimes strength looks like showing up at school after your world has collapsed, smiling when you can, crying when you must and somehow making it through another day.
Maybe that is the strength I did not know I had.
Not the strength to avoid being broken. The strength to keep moving after the breaking.
Death takes much. But by the grace of God, it does not get to take everything.
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Copyright © 2026 Doug DeBolt.
