This naturally rang true for grieving mum Tammy Taylor, who lost her 17-year-old son Skyler in a car crash on his way to school eight months ago.
Tammy knew that Skyler had his phone with him when the tragic accident occurred, but authorities had never quite managed to recover it from the scene.
Moved by that ache to be close to her son, Tammy enlisted the help of family and Skyler’s friends to search the crash site and find the missing phone.
“Anything that was a part of him, I wanted to find. As a mother, you try to get as many pictures as you can throughout their lives, and you never imagine something like this happening. And I got to thinking that [the photos I have] are the only pictures I’ll ever have of him,” she told Yahoo! Parenting.
Having previously search the site “30 times at least”, there was a breakthrough during Tammy’s recent renewed search – she found the phone.
She recalled: “It was completely buried in the dirt. But one little bitty tiny corner was sticking out – it’s like the sun was shining on that one particular spot. I got a stick and dug out around it. We’ve have snow, rain, flooding, so when I got it out it was full of mud. But I was dancing around and shouting, ‘Thank you God, I needed this!’”
Tammy went to her nearest Apple store with the phone to recover the images stored on it, and was surprised and absolutely delighted to find Skyler’s very last selfie, taken on the morning of his accident with a group of his best friends.
“It’s very dear to my heart,” she said of the discovery.
What an incredibly moving story. Our hearts go out to Tammy and her family.
