My name is Jennifer Sutton and this is my personal
story about how my grief journey began.
February 15, 2023 my world was turned upside down. My husband had been away for a business training about 4 hours away. He had been home the weekend prior and was supposed to be finishing up his training and headed back home February 17th. My daughter and I are not really morning people and he would always check in to make sure we were awake and on our way to school. I had texted him but got busy getting her ready for school and lost track of time. I tried calling him on our way to school and he didn't answer. Ok...maybe he's still getting ready...then I realized that he should be on his way out the door to training. I tried calling his work cell phone...still nothing. My gut told me something was not right. However as a Mom we press on right?! I went through car line, dropped my daughter off and then googled the Hotel quick and called the front desk to be transferred to his room. STILL no answer. So now I absolutely knew something was terribly wrong. I looked up his location on Life 360 and it said he was still at the hotel. I called his co-worker and his twin daughters who were getting ready for school to see if they had heard anything from him, all no's. Now I was in panic mode and I called the hotel back and told them they needed to send someone up to his room to check on him. The desk clerk acted like I was crazy and I then insisted that someone go check the room. She finally called the maintenance person and asked them to go check his room and then got put on hold. I ended up hanging up and calling back because she never got back on the line to update me. When I called back she said that he checked the door but he didn't answer and the door was locked from inside the room. (Well don't we all double, triple lock our hotel room doors? UGH!!) At this point my Mother-in-law had tried calling the hotel for an update as well and my step-daughter called 911. The police sent 2 officers over to the hotel to check on him.
I will tell you that everything seemed like a complete time warp. From the time we called 911 and called back twice to try to get any sort of an update was the worst few hours of my life. It took at least two hours to get any information. During that time I had gone over to my neighbor's house and we called every nearby hospital to see if he had been brought there. I don't remember which hospital is was but the woman I spoke to listened to me telling her that I hadn't been given any updates well after an hour or so and calling 911 back twice. She promised me she would get some sort of information for me and call me back. It was pure hell waiting. I was 4 hours away and couldn't just jump in the car and get answers any faster. Eventually after a couple hours a detective called me to give me the horrible news I knew in my heart was true. He had passed away. My world fell apart at that moment. He was our rock! He loved his family more than anything in this world and he was healthy. HOW could this have happened?
