A ray of light in the suffocating darkness....my daughter

Today, I made a conscious decision to focus on something in my life that I am grateful for. And I thought of my daughter.Her strength in the face of adversity, her bravery in the face of tragedy, humbles me. She has had to endure so much, see so much, yet she still endures. I feel a punch in the gut every time I recall that morning, the morning that changed our lives forever. As I looked up from doing CPR on QMM - hunched on the floor over him, willing him to breath, to move, to do anything - I saw MAM standing in the doorway. She was still in her pajamas, with a look of horror and disbelief on her face. When I went to the hospital after the ambulance took the boys and BAM (my husband), she sat next to me in the backseat of the car. She sat next to me, both of us holding each others hands. She was my anchor in a suddenly volatile ocean; my only child that I knew was alive, was breathing; my only friend in a suddenly alien and foreign world. We were both in the car, hoping against hope that the boys would be alive, that at least ONE of them would stay with us. But it was not meant to be, and my poor daughter saw them as I did in the hospital...lying motionless, lifeless, side by side on the same stretcher, covered with a white sheet. And when we moved the sheet back, we both saw their eternally sleeping faces.
This is what she saw, what she went through. And that was just the beginning...for she has a whole life stretched out in front of her without her beloved brothers, with her memories of them, including her last memory of when she saw them. Yet, she is still moving forward, trying to make sense of this new life without her two younger brothers, walking the halls of her high school without QMM at her side. Her life has been changed forever.
MAM reminds me of a candle in a dark storm. Chaos churns around the candle, it falters but continues to fight the vicious winds, and perseveres. In the gloomy darkness, the candle emits its halo of soft light, piercing the darkness with its gentle rays. And that is what my daughter is for me...my candle in this now dark world.
Love you MAM,always.