because he wasn t sad or scared. he added, i m okay with whatever god decides. did that bring you peace? a lot, yes. he wasn t afraid of dying anymore at that point. the day he chose to make this video, we had that home church that morning and we didn t know what he was doing afterwards. but that s when he went into his room and made this video. so a week later, christmas day we actually had a wonderful christmas morning together. we opened presents as a family. we re all laughing and ben was very adamant about playing our annual family game of monopoly. it was right after that that he went outside with jake and watched him jump on the trampoline with his friends. i was in the kitchen starting to fix christmas dinner and i looked outside my kitchen window
he said kid cuddy had his hand on ben s shoulder. he said there s this mirror. he said when he was looking in that mirror he wasn t just looking at that reflection, he saw his whole life. he said when he looked in the mirror it was the best feeling and he was happy with everything that happened in his life and he was proud of himself. and ben thought he was going forward to heaven, but instead, he woke up on the floor of the high school. i had come home from college to visit that weekend. we sat out by the lake on our boat dock. it was very unusual to find him out in the dark in the middle of the night in the winter when it was so cold so i asked him why he was there.
and i took a mental snapshot of ben standing there smiling. that was the last time i saw him smile. almost immediately after that, jake came running in the back door and he said, mom, it s ben! i yelled at shawn to come outside and we started doing cpr right away. shawn and i felt really alone in those moments. and i just had the thought, all right, if this is the time, god, you can take care of him [ ambulance siren ] i knew he had passed away but i didn t believe it until i heard from my parents at the hospital. we had to deal with the reality of that.
his arrhythmia had been back. he was getting more tired. i felt like things were getting out of control. jake came running in the back door and he said, mom, it s ben. his face was already blue right now, for practically just your signature, you could drive home for the holidays in a new volkswagen. like the sporty, advanced new jetta and the precisely engineered passat tdi. ah, the gift of clean diesel. for the new volkswagen on your list this year, just about all you need, is a pen. festive, isn t it? get zero due at signing, zero down, zero deposit, and zero first month s payment on select new volkswagen models.
seizure because he was conscious and he was talking. his fingers were blue. by the time we got to the e.r., we learned there was an abscess on the tonsil. so we went into everything expecting it to be extremely routine. but it was during the surgery that ben experienced cardiac arrest. he finally got up to icu and he was unconscious and they had him on a breathing machine. they warned us that when he woke up, the hope was he would be able to breath on his own. we didn t know what to expect and when he woke up, he looked at ali or me or one of us and said, guys, i need to get back to work. and that s the first thing on his mind. and we re like, okay, ben s back. ben s body was just getting weaker.