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A phone call in the middle of the night is always a parent's worst fear. A phone call late Thanksgiving night was my worst nightmare come true. The clock was striking 11 PM when the phone rang. My brother and his wife were getting ready to go home, but stopped in the process of leaving when they heard my husband's conversation on the telephone. I had heard the scanner 10 or 15 minutes earlier, calling out the fire and ambulance personnel for a roll-over south of the city, and as always, I said a quick prayer that whoever it was would be alright.

My husband has been in the fire service for over thirty years; as such, he has witnessed and done things in the line of duty that I hope to God I'll never have to go through. Death, dismemberment, fatal wounds, etc. he deals with them on a daily basis; but nothing prepared him or me for that phone call that changed our lives forever.

I stood by my brother as my husband had a brief conversation with the fire Lt. who was a firefighter who worked with my husband; they had been the first responders on the scene. The Lt. and his crew recognized my son, broken as he was, and called from the scene of the accident to give us the horrible news. I remember falling to the floor and staring, not blinking, not seeing, not hearing; but the pain and horror were right there, so strong I thought I was going to die.

My husband said I went into shock at hearing that my son was dead, killed in a car crash. He was the roll-over I had heard on the scanner. They said he died instantly of a broken neck and fractured skull, caused by blunt trauma to his head and upper body. His car had rolled over several times; he didn't have his seat belt on and was tossed inside the car like a rag doll. The car was crushed so bad that the tow-truck driver used a regular dolly to put the car on the back of his truck.

We had to buy a special coffin for viewing my son at the funeral home due to the massive trauma to the left side of his head. The visiting hours, the funeral itself, all the people who had stood on the sidewalk as the funeral procession passed, paying their last respects to my son with a wave or a salute, these things all went by in a blur as we led a procession of cars to the cemetery, and my son took one last ride through town. A few weeks later, on Christmas Eve, my husband and I and my son's fiance went to the cemetery to put flowers on my son's grave, and to tell him Merry Christmas. That was almost three years ago, and I've only been to the

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