After losing Isaiah, Mona did what so many grieving parents do.

She disappeared.

Not all at once. But slowly, quietly, she started skipping the family gatherings where she would feel his absence most sharply, surrounded by all his cousins growing up without him. She got good at wearing a mask, at being on for other people, at performing a version of herself that did not make anyone uncomfortable. And when the exhaustion of all that pretending became too much, she retreated. Into the cave, as she calls it. Until she felt ready to come out again.

It took her a long time to learn the difference between solitude and isolation. One is necessary. The other is lonely.

Isaiah was Mona's only child, her greatest joy, a boy who told her he loved her at least ten times a day and meant it every time. He was funny and easygoing and patient in ways she was not, the kind of kid who would watch you drop the roof of a gingerbread house and just shrug and say it was okay. He was thirteen years old when he died in an accident while clearing trees on the family property. Mona was home packing for a trip. A knock on the door. A two and a half hour drive to Flagstaff Medical Center. And then a doctor who walked out and told her he was gone.

Six years later, she is still carrying it. She has started EMDR, working carefully and bravely toward the day she will be ready to process the memory of that day itself. She has learned, slowly, that letting people in is not a burden to them. It is, as she says, a way of allowing them to love her.

And she has been loved well.

At Isaiah's celebration of life, she said something out loud - that she wanted to collect some money and give it to a charity in his name. Her friend Jessica and her twin sister heard those words, and took them seriously. Within months, they had raised $80,000 to build a medical and dental clinic in Honduras, named La Luz de Isaiah. The Light of Isaiah.

When Mona traveled to Honduras to see the clinic, strangers had painted a dragonfly mural on the wall inside, because Isaiah's favorite insect was a dragonfly. She stood in that room, and for the first time in a long time, she felt something she had been afraid she had lost.

She felt like God had not forgotten her.

Out of that moment, and out of a conversation between Mona and Jessica on the phone afterward, La Luz de Isaiah Foundation was born. Their Dragonfly Wishes program helps grieving parents bring to life the tributes and memorials they have dreamed of but could not carry alone. A bench in a park. A community art fair. A clinic in Honduras. Whatever honors the child, in whatever size fits the family. Jessica does the logistics, the phone calls, the fundraising, the advocacy. Mona holds the heart of it.

Because what they both want, more than anything, is for every grieving parent to feel what Mona felt in that clinic.

Seen. Remembered. Not forgotten.

You can learn more and apply for a Dragonfly Wish at laluzdeisaiah.org.