USA First Lady Dr. Jill Biden and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff

Dear First Lady MK Pritzker,
I lost my first son, Keith, on October 19, 2017, at the forever age of 34, two weeks after
his birthday. He was our only son. He died due to someone poisoning him with fentanyl.
He has one sister Dawn and at the time we watched her 2-year-old daughter as she was
a nurse working 12-hour shifts. Her husband was working as a police officer. Sometimes
it was hard for us with a little one, Keith would come out of his room and play with her.
They had a very special bond. She is now 7 and she still asks about him. We celebrated
his next birthday on vacation. We brought his ashes with us and made a cake. She
asked me if Keith was coming. I told her how he can’t because he is in Heaven now. She
said, “Maybe he will grandma, maybe he will surprise you”. She taught her sister about
Keith. She is now 3 years old, and she asks us about Keith all the time. We went to the
Passion of Christ in Indiana. Hailey was 3 years old. At the end Jesus comes back and
she yells “see Keith can come back too”. I just sobbed.
Keith will never be able to be a dad. He will never have a wife. He will never get to play
with Hailey or her two sisters. Keith is gone and the pain is unreal. Our family is forever
changed, and it hurts every day.
Keith was in a car accident with his small Saturn car in 2009. He always helped people
out. I still remember him getting ready that night. He was waiting to turn into a gas
station, and he was hit from behind. The person that hit him took off. It spun the car, and
someone also hit him from the other direction. The car looked like it had exploded. It was
just on a city street. We were called to the hospital that night. We sat for hours in the
waiting room in the dark. We were the only ones there. The doctor came out about 5
hours later and said, “He is alive, but we couldn’t put his arm back on!”. I looked at him
and said, “How does an arm come off?” He barely made it. His colon was twisted from
the seatbelt and then he got gangrene so they had to keep his stomach open until they
could reattach it again. He spent months in the hospital. He had traumatic brain injury
and he had to learn to eat and walk again. He spent time in a rehab learning how to get in
and out of a car, how to feed himself. We had to learn how to change an ileostomy bag
and keep the open stomach clean with fake skin and some lace up bandage. He went
back into the hospital to have skin grafted from his thigh to the end of his stub because it
wasn’t healing. He was in so much pain, he would yell “just let me die”. He went back into
the hospital months later to have his colon put back in and about a year later he ended up
with a hernia that had to be fixed.
Keith certainly was never the same. I believe he had eight surgeries in total. As a child
he was a model. He was in Kmart, JC Penney’s, and Montgomery Wards on the same
week and now he had no arm and a TBI. He ended up getting a job in a haunted house.
For
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