There was a time when there was some turmoil in
the area of Afghanistan where I knew Brent was serving. And I saw
a news story, I reached right out to him through a text message.
I said, “Are you okay?”
He said that he was fine,
but the several men he knew had been killed. And that was
the closest to home it felt,
but even in that moment, I didn’t think, “Well, what if it’s your turn next?”
On our second date, Brent and I were driving and it was just
a 45-minute drive in the car,
and that’s where we really started to get to know each other.
One of the first things he mentioned was that he wanted to join
the military. I'll never forget that moment.
My stomach hit the floor, and
I was really caught off guard by how caught off guard I was.
Why do I care if this kid from Arizona wants to join the Army?
All of our conversations and dreams about
the future involved that desire to serve in the military,
that shared commitment again to this country.
We'd been dating about two weeks when I had
the thought pop into my mind completely out of nowhere
that said if Brent Taylor were to ask me to marry him, I would say yes.
And I reacted just like that.
And I thought, “Oh my goodness, I don’t even know this man. That’s terrible.
You can’t get married that quickly.”
We ended up dating nine months, but we just both knew. Early on in our
marriage, right after we found out we were expecting our first baby,
Brent learned of a possible deployment. Newly pregnant,
we’s just spent a year apart for his basic training
and other initial training with the military, and it was in that moment,
I'll never forget that long, long night in December of 2004,
when we stayed up all night talking about what if.
In that moment, I remember both of us being very emotional, very reflective,
very prayerful, and very tearful.
But by the time the sun rose that morning, we had decided, yes,
he would go where he needed to go to serve our country.
We would answer that call without fear, without hesitation.
And I can honestly say it’s the only time we really ever had those
“What if” conversations.
Service is what leadership is all about.
And today I'm announcing that
I will be deploying to Afghanistan to continue my service as a member of
the Army National Guard.
He ended up doing two tours of duty in Iraq and two in Afghanistan.
In the middle of that, we had seven children, and he ran
for public office in my hometown.
And then he had run and won reelection
the second time shortly before his final deployment.
Right before he left, I looked him right in the eye and I told him,
“I can’t do this. If you don’t come back.
I can’t explain to these kids and our family why you chose to leave.
I just can’t do this. Are you coming back?”
And he looked right at me with that know-it-all grin that he always had.
And he said, “Yeah, I’ve prayed about it. I’m coming back.”
And that was enough for both of us.
So every Saturday, Brent took a lot of the Afghans on a rock march,
which is a fancy name for a hike.
He did it for two reasons. One, physical fitness.
He was really concerned that the Afghans didn't have
the physical fitness that they needed to have in place.
And so he looked at this as an opportunity to take a day off,
but get that exercise in. But he also really used it to build relationships.
They’re laughing. They’re smiling. They’re racing each other.
They're giving each other a hard time.
And so it was a workout, but it was also a team-building exercise.
And they did it every single Saturday, every Saturday.
And I knew that every Saturday morning that's where he was.
And so that morning I got a phone call first thing in
the morning from my mother who was home with my children.
And she said that there were two army officers at my house in full dress
uniform, and they were asking to speak face to face with me.
And that can only mean one thing.
I remember they read whatever script it is they read on behalf of
the Department of the Army. “We regret to inform you dot, dot, dot.”
And I remember the first words out of my mouth were, “They killed him on
a hike.” This man’s been deployed to combat zones four times.
He survived the Taliban, al Qaeda,
all kinds of really high level advising with top level officials.
He'd been there four different times and they killed him on a hike.
You certainly didn't see that coming.
At first the grief was really scary and
the anxiety would have consumed me far more than the grief.
And I'd be so afraid that I would always feel that way.
I would never get through this. I would never be happy again.
I would never be able to breathe or look ahead.
And that anxiety is crippling.
But some of the hardest parts of grief for me are
the little things that catch me off guard. A song on the radio.
A rose growing in the garden. And it made me so mad.
It was the first spring right after he had died
and that rosebud came back to life.
And I was so angry because Brent wasn’t here to see it.
And it wasn’t just the one spring he wouldn’t see that rosebud bloom,
I knew that year, after year, after year,
it’s almost as if Mother Nature would mock me and come back to life
and he would remain dead.
I will admit I have not found myself asking why Brent Taylor had to die at
age 39. I have found myself asking every single day,
“How are we going to do this?”
And I think that's sometimes the most frustrated
I get is when I’m overwhelmed with my kids and I find
myself talking half to God and half to Brent, just saying, “Where are you?
I can't do this alone. I told you I couldn't do this alone.
I can’t raise four boys and three girls and I’ve got teenagers.”
And he never knew teenagers.
I joked a lot that he was deployed through a lot of the diaper days
and he died right as we got our first teenager. That's really unfair.
That's a lot of weight on
a mom to say go raise seven kids in today's crazy world.
So my greatest frustrations come when I feel
the weight of just how much responsibility there is in raising
a family and keeping my head up and trying to make ends meet
and get everything done on the to-do list of mortality. And
I’ll find myself very frustrated saying, “Where are you? Why are you here?
I can’t do this.” And inevitably, every time I get to that place,
I'll find some kind of tender mercy, whether it's a thought in my mind,
a text from a friend,
a knock on the door—
just something that I know in that moment both God and Brent reminding me,
“We’re right here.” Bless us in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.
My daughter had had a church lesson one day, not long after Brent died,
where they talked about prayer, and isn’t it beautiful that we can
pray to God, and God will answer our prayers. “Who taught you how to pray?”
And she said, “I prayed every day for God to keep Dad safe.”
And her question, of course, was, “So what do you say about prayer?”
And it would have been easy to try to explain around that.
And instead I just told her, “Isn’t that true?”
Sometimes we don’t get the answer to the prayers we need.
And I think the kids need to hear that.
I think they need to realize it is unfair.
They need to know that life is going to have ups
and downs that are out of our control. And that's part of the plan.
And that doesn’t mean God’s not there, and it doesn’t mean He’s not listening,
but it means we might need to trust Him in His ways and still hang in there
and have hope that it will work out.
I don’t really love when people say, “Oh, God needed a hero,”
or “It was his time to go.”
And while I understand the sentiment behind that, I completely disagree.
I think a lot of times mortal life ends because we're mortal,
or our lives might be taken by
a foolish decision someone else has made.
I don't view God as short handed on the other side.
He has a lot of remarkable,
amazing men and women who have lived for thousands of years.
We could make a list of prophets presidents, inventors, scientists—
He's got quite a few people over there.
I could make a pretty convincing argument that nobody needed
Brent Taylor more than Brent Taylor’s seven little kids.
I remember the very day after Brent died.
I can picture where I was in my bedroom when that thought came into my mind:
“This will be good for me.
This will bless me and my children.” And I remember hating that thought.
How can you possibly say such a tragedy is possibly a blessing?
And yet now I’d be lying if I didn’t say
it’s been an incredible blessing,
though I still have a hard time forming that sentence.
I hate saying my husband's death has blessed my life so much
because that hurts, but I can't deny it.
God has blessed us so much through what has happened.
Again, I don't think God caused it and I don't think it had to happen
so I could learn those lessons.
I think God's let us learn those lessons because of what happened.
And I pray we will never forget what we see and feel here this morning.
Every parent has said more than once: “Life is not fair.”
In some of my darkest moments, some of my deepest anguish.
I've come to believe that life is incredibly unfair in our favor.
“Whom do men say that I, the son of man, am?”
If we want to talk about who had the most unfair life on this planet,
of course it would be Jesus Christ.
“What shall I do then, with Jesus.
who is called the Christ?”
No one was more abandoned or more betrayed or suffered more
or greater than He did. And yet He did so
so that He could make everything right in our lives.
He took all of the unfairness
so that He could help us right these wrongs.
And again, some of them get made right in this life and a lot of them don't.
But to me, the greatest miracle of all is knowing things
really will work out.
I think it's important to recognize that even though we want everything to
happen for a reason, it's probably
a better mindset to let God help make reason of everything that happens.
If Brent were here, I would tell him thank you for dying for me,
for literally being willing to give his life.
I look at him and Jesus Christ as two amazing gifts in my life.
The Savior clearly who gave His life for all of us to overcome death
and sin through His infinite Atonement.
But over the last three years, I’ve come to know Him in a very intimate way.
I know Jesus Christ is real. I know He’s closer to me than I might think.
I know He loves me and He’s aware of all of my weaknesses and my fears
and my anxieties. And I know He’s willing to walk with me hand in hand
and make sure that I can get through whatever it is I need to face in a day.
And then I look at this great symbol that
I have in my own husband, that he too laid down his life so that
I could have opportunities.
My husband's death has opened a lot of doors
for me to be able to do God's will and help other people and learn
and grow. And I think every day how grateful
I am that he would be willing to die for me.
That's a pretty overwhelming statement to make that my husband literally gave
his life for me. I guess I'll get out of bed this morning and go try to do
the best with the time he gave me.
We in mortal life live a lot with “or” as our thought,
we can be here or there. We can be happy or sad.
We can be heartbroken or hopeful.
And I think I’m learning how to use the word “and.” I can remember and love
and miss the past, and be optimistic about the future.
I can be heartbroken and happy in the same breath.
I can be devastated and determined to keep going all at once.
And I think that’s what the gospel of Jesus Christ offers, is that
“and.” We don’t have to choose this or that. He lets us find healing.
He lets us be whole in Him so that we can face the struggles of life
and know that life really is a beautiful
Gift from him.