I prayed, “Lord, You have allowed me to minister to many different people in many different places. Please help me to minister to my family today.”
The first Sunday in May 1995 started out wonderfully. I was in Chicago for the first time to attend the Evangelical Press Association convention with two colleagues. We visited the historic Moody Church that morning. Meanwhile, my wife, who was a few weeks pregnant, was spending the weekend with her mother and sister in Virginia.
When my coworkers and I returned to the hotel after lunch, I had a phone message to get to Wytheville, Virginia, as soon as possible because Sharon had gone into premature labor. By the time I reached the tiny hospital around midnight, she had miscarried.
A couple of days later, Sharon and I made the sad five-hour drive back home to Cleveland, Tennessee.
Late that summer, Sharon thought she might be pregnant again, but we had not mentioned this to anyone. One Sunday at the church altar, our pastor, Rick Riley, came to us and quietly asked if Sharon was expecting. We said we didn’t know; he then asked if he could pray for our unborn child. We said yes, and we soon found out Sharon was indeed pregnant. Our pastor’s prayer encouraged us during the ensuing months.
May 14, 1996, started out wonderfully. It was Mother’s Day and our third anniversary; and it became our first daughter’s birthday. We named her April Lauren. On that day, Sharon and I would have never imagined that we would outlive April.
The most frightening moment in April’s growing-up years was when a friend and I took our children sledding following southeast Tennessee’s infamous two-foot-deep snow of 1993. April was 7; her little sister, Allison, was 5. Someone had given us a classic Flexible Flyer sled, and I, a native Floridian, discovered how fast it would fly down the biggest hill of Cleveland’s Waterville Golf Course.
It took some doing, but I finally convinced April to try it. “It’s so much fun!” I told her. I showed her how to lay on her belly and use the front handles to steer. At last, she was off!
The faster and further she flew, the more I realized she was headed straight for a dump truck parked at the hill’s bottom. “Turn, April, turn!” I screamed, but she didn’t. At the last moment, she threw up her right arm, which took the brunt of the crash instead of her head. Thankfully, she suffered only a broken arm.
Ten years later, April was steering something much bigger—her Hyundai—over another huge hill in the subdivision where we were living. A sheriff’s deputy called me to report my daughter had lost control due to speed, spun the car around, and crashed into a concrete culvert. Graciously, the only thing broken this time was a front axle.
A few months later, April graduated from Walker Valley High School. We weren’t surprised when she became an art major in college. She had always loved to draw—I still have some of her elementary-school artwork—and she won awards for her drawings and paintings. We (nor she), however, had any idea that for her senior project at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, she would create art symbolic of cancer. The reason? During that year, her thyroid had been removed due to cancer.
April was engaged at that time, and now cancer-free, she married Alan Keen in January 2010.
After their first daughter, Ellsie, was born in December 2011, April and Alan moved seven hours away to Fayetteville, North Carolina, where he became a full-time worship pastor. Their second daughter, Elin, was born two years later. In 2016, April completed a master’s degree in professional counseling from Liberty University.
April worked as an outpatient therapist for the Haymount Institute for several years. At church, she led a small group for women traumatized by abortion.
Then came her next crash. Not feeling well, April went to a doctor in November 2019, where she was diagnosed with stage-four metastatic breast cancer. It had aggressively spread into her pelvis, spine, and sternum. The doctor said she was “actively dying.” He thought she might live only two to three more months.
Thankfully, he was wrong. Hundreds of people began praying immediately, and chemotherapy treatments started the week after Thanksgiving. The cancer backed off, and although April’s life was filled with countless medical appointments and procedures, it was livable.
In June 2022, April and her family relocated to Chattanooga, just 30 miles away from us. That fall, she suffered a radiation-induced seizure that set her back. In August 2023, she experienced another episode that rendered her right arm and left leg useless. So, my wife began spending a lot of time in Chattanooga helping to care for April and her family.
When chemotherapy quit working in early spring 2024, there was no viable alternative. April’s short-term memory began failing, and then her long-term memory.
Because April’s health was deteriorating quickly, I returned home from the General Assembly in Indianapolis on July 11, a day early, and postponed a mission trip to Malawi scheduled for the last week of July. Meanwhile, April’s doctor said her time was short.
On the first evening, a Hospice worker came to their apartment, and April didn’t recognize any of us. I asked her if I could play a song for her, and she said yes. Thinking it might bring a flicker of remembrance, I played “Jesus Loves Me” on my phone. She listened, smiled, and said, “That’s nice.”
By Wednesday, July 24, April was non-communicative and barely taking in any nourishment. Three mornings later, I drove to Chattanooga alone because Sharon was not feeling well. As I drove, I prayed, “Lord, You have allowed me to minister to many different people in many different places. Please help me to minister to my family today.”
When I went into April’s bedroom, I was amazed when she looked at me and said, “Pray.”
I responded, “Did you ask me to pray?”
She said, “Pray.”
I put my right hand on April’s arm and prayed, “Lord, April is in Your hands,” and pleaded for Him to take care of her. That evening, she slipped into a coma. Two days later, on July 29, she took her last breath on earth, leaving us with the hope found in 2 Corinthians 5:8: “to be absent from the body” is “to be present with the Lord.”
As I am writing this reflection three months after April’s passing, I better understand how to help people who are grieving.
- Pray for God’s peace to prevail. As Philippians 4:6-7 says, the peace of God “exceeds anything we can understand” and can “guard [their] hearts and minds” amid great loss. In our saddest moments, the Lord has given Sharon and me the calm assurance that April is with Him.
- Every act of kindness matters. Every text message, card, phone call, gift, and visit has encouraged us. Sometimes people are concerned they will say or do the wrong thing, so they do nothing; but that’s the biggest mistake. Throughout these months, no one has said or done anything that was inappropriate. They have all been acts of love.
- Remember the children. In nearly five decades of working with kids, I have ministered to hundreds suffering from abandonment, abuse, divorce, and death. But now that I see how deeply our 10-year-old and 12-year-old granddaughters have been wounded by their mom’s passing, I better grasp how children are impacted by loss. Grieving children need our ongoing prayers, kind words, and loving actions.
- Loss hits individuals differently. Our son-in-law lost his wife; our youngest daughter lost her only sibling. Both need specialized acts of kindness.
- Continue to reach out. A couple of days ago, I received this text: “Just wanted to let you know that we’re thinking of you and praying for you.” On the same day, someone who was unable to attend April’s memorial service came up to me with tears in his eyes and expressed his concern. If the Holy Spirit brings to mind someone who has lost a loved one in recent months or even years, pray for them and express your love to them.
- Live 2 Corinthians 1:4: “God is our merciful Father and the source of all comfort. He comforts us in all our troubles so that we can comfort others. When they are troubled, we will be able to give them to the same comfort God has given us” (NLT).
Lance Colkmire is the editor of Evangel Magazine.