COACH HANNAH CHIJIOKE-DAVIS

“I'm willing to be made willing”

On July 11th, 2011, we went to a local swimming hole in the mountains that some people had told us about.

CJ and some other relatives were tubing down a little rapid that went around a curve of the river. He, my brother-in-law, and a bunch of kids we were with had gone down this small rapid multiple times that morning.
At one point, our four-year-old daughter, Cadence, said she wanted to ride.

CJ agreed and said, "Okay, I'll take you down." So he got on the tube and put her on his lap.

I remember as they floated off down past me while I played with our baby in the shallow water, he called out to me to see our daughter waving as they went by. I waved back, and they went around the corner.

A few moments later, I heard a shout from one of my brothers to my brother-in-law, Aaron. I knew something was seriously wrong, at the time, I actually thought it was something about our daughter.

CJ was this big, strong, bigger-than-life guy who was six foot three.

Nothing could ever stop him. That's why I thought something had happened to Cadence.

I remember hearing my sister-in-law say, "Oh, their tube got tipped over." She had seen them as they went around the curve that they had hit a rock.

I was worried about our daughter, I grabbed my baby and ran along the bank around the curve where CJ and Cadence should have come out.

When I got there, I did not see my husband but instead saw somebody, a stranger at the time, holding Cadence.
The stranger told me later that CJ pushed our daughter to her and said, "help me".

Then he went under the water, and that was the last time he was seen alive.
What followed was an hours-long search to find him.

While we waited for emergency and medical personnel to arrive, we were just frantic, desperately searching for him, looking for him to pop back up out of the water somewhere.

My brothers were all looking. My sisters were looking. Everybody who had been going down the river and even complete strangers were looking.

I was standing there, while all this was going on, and I was holding my daughter and my baby... and I was just in shock, thinking, "This can't be my life. Widowed at thirty-two with five little kids. Our kids are just babies!"

Then I had a distinct thought that was beyond my conscious mind, "Can I not accept good from the Lord and not also hard from the Lord?"

Inwardly, I bowed my head and answered, “the Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord...” Even while my heart was breaking into a million pieces.

That day my life forever and completely changed from what I considered to be my life plan, I took a couple of months off of work to get settled and begin learning what the new norm was going to be for me and our kids. To read more about that day and our subsequent journey, check out my old blog.

I decided that I wasn't going to let my kids become statistics of losing their dad, so I read all the books I could find about single-parent families. There weren't a lot of resources at the time about how to deal with being a widow at thirty-two.

A lot of what I found was for much older people or not in my stage of life at all. It was quite challenging to find any kind of real help for us.

The Lord had really taken me through a journey over those years prior to losing CJ...

He was preparing the way for us for us to be cared for during the absolute hardest times of our lives. Because of the work I had done years earlier, building community through our church, work, mom groups, and women's bible study when we had just moved to Texas.

I am so thankful that God impressed that upon me and worked it out because through building those relationships over the years, we had an entire support system that immediately stepped in and began carrying us as we processed our traumatic experience and navigated the grieving process.

I also had the help of my extended family in that tough time, between them and our community, the kids and I had a large group of these amazing people around us who literally just picked us up and carried us and took care of us in every aspect.

To have these people who are not my blood family, who chose to be my family, and who just surrounded us and carried us during those impossible times... It was priceless.