Outside a Short Pump coffee shop, a picture-perfect spring day was taking shape: blue sky, warm breeze, blooming flowers.
Precisely the sort of day 15 Aprils ago when Lori Wyatt came home from work to find her 16-year-old son had shot himself.
"It's really hard when you have a day like this," Wyatt told me as we sat inside the coffee shop.
But Wyatt gets through days like that -- and there are many of them -- in part because her family chose to donate Nick's organs, which saved five lives.
There also is this: Wyatt serves as a volunteer grief companion for other parents who choose organ donation after losing children.
"This has truly been a godsend," Wyatt said.
April is National Donate Life Month, but this is a side of donation often overlooked.
The companion program is part of donor family bereavement support offered by LifeNet Health, which coordinates organ and tissue donation in Virginia. Other services include remembrance ceremonies, workshops and online groups.
But the companion program is a most intimate approach, pairing trained donor family members with the newly bereaved. It's impossible to overstate the importance of common experience.
"She absolutely knew," said Annie Parr of Charlottesville, who was paired with Wyatt soon after her 24-year-old son, Jeremy, died in an accidental shooting in 2005. Jeremy's transplanted organs saved six lives.
"Everybody else could say, 'I know how you feel,'" she said. "But nobody else could know except another mother who'd lost a son.
Wyatt listened to Parr cry and talk about her son for hours, and Parr said flatly, "I don't know if I would have made it through that first year if I hadn't had her." They've become like sisters.
Wyatt, who lives in western Henrico County, has worked with a half-dozen parents through LifeNet. She said it's remarkable how many other parents she falls into conversation with in airports and other places who've lost children. Everyone she reaches is an answer to her prayer to give meaning to her son's life.
"I had to take [his death] and turn it into something positive," Wyatt said. "If you don't you're only going to be destroyed."
Reaching that point, though, took years of tears. Her training in the Stephen Ministry, a Christian program that teaches laypeople to provide one-on-one care, was a first step. LifeNet's program came next.
"It was a life-saver," Wyatt said of her work as a grief companion. "I didn't want people to forget my Nicholas. He's not here to remind people how wonderful he was. This is my one way of showing the world, yeah, my son made a really bad choice, however he was a really good kid."
Nick, the youngest of three, was a fun-loving, 6-foot-2 beanpole who hadn't grown into his size 13 feet when he died. Wyatt laughed as she told me stories about Nick and showed me a scrapbook she's putting together about his life. Grief companions like scrapbooking as a way to keep alive their children's memories and help themselves through dark periods that can come at any time: birthdays, sad anniversaries, even pretty spring days.
"I would never have thought 15 years ago this is where I would be," she said. "I didn't think I was strong enough. I've gotten not only stronger, but I think more compassionate and caring."
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