the end of the before

These are the last photos taken of me before my Mom went into cardiac arrest twice and fell into a coma for five days, before the doctors said if she woke up she’d most likely be brain dead, before she had to spend over a month in the hospital and undergo multiple surgeries—before my entire world tilted.

An event like this puts a marker on your life, there is before and there is an after. These photos by Brett Donar mark the end of the before and I am so incredibly grateful to have them.

When you almost lose the most important person in your life, when you spend five days by their bedside amongst beeping machines and flickering monitors waiting for any sign that they’re still there, when you are stuck in limbo between the dead and living and have to wrestle with the thought of moving forward without them, when you fight to come to terms with them waking up as someone else—a shell of who they once were…

It changes you. It ages you.

It breaks your heart and even at the end of all of it, you’re struggling to put the pieces back together. But they’ll never fit quite right.

See the rest of these beautiful photos by Brett Donar taken at Black Balsam Knob in the Blue Ridge Mountains on our Rhodes Wedding Co. blog… click button below.