It’s been three years since my son Thomas died on May 2, 2021, and the absolute and utter permanence of his departure from life has continued to shape and define the destiny that I am creating with my choices, and the destiny that I have in God from the foundations of the world – both of which are happening together at the same time.

The sum of his worldly possessions sits just across the hall from my home office in my library, in unopened boxes that quietly summon me to make a third and final pass through them to determine their final fate. It’s the mundane, pedestrian artifacts that are hardest for me to part with – his toothbrush, comb, toothpaste, after shave and his razor that still has remnants of his beard. Thomas’ shoes, shirts, and the unwashed sheets from his bed are untouched because they still smell like him. These artifacts were, and remain, the most intimate evidence that Thomas once lived. Yet paradoxically they were taken for granted and hardly noticed by him, or me, when he was alive. The bed that he slept in, and died in, now sits in that same library surrounded by hundreds of books rather than bright colorful posters of the bands he loved, and ticket stubs from the concerts he attended. It’s a room in his family’s house that he’s never been in – in yet another year in which he never lived a single day.

As I move into the fourth year after Thomas’ death, the process of surviving the death of my son, finding new life in the wake of this unspeakable loss, and now navigating the journey home has come down to the kind of grievance story that I create. For the first three years, I could not bring myself to talk about Thomas’ life and death publicly. One-on-one and small group discussions with family and friends were fine, but not in front of larger groups of people or on social media. The inner resistance to doing it was enormous.

I had friends who had lost one or more children to counterfeit pills and fentanyl poisoning who had started nonprofit organizations to get the word out to other kids and save lives. They asked me if I would be willing to be interviewed for a video about Thomas’s death to warn others about this dark crime. I always said no, but I could never explain why. I just kept looking to the Lord as my primary support and quietly focused on rebuilding my life with Elin back in Colorado as I worked on writing my forthcoming memoir, Finding New Life After the Death of My Son, hoping it might become my way of telling others about Thomas’s life and death, and the grace, forgiveness, and faithfulness of God throughout my life.

The first time I spoke about Thomas’s death publicly was the Victim Impact Statement that I read at the sentencing of the person who unintentionally killed him, in a courtroom filled with people who were there to remember Thomas’s life and mourn his death. The second time I spoke to a crowd about Thomas’s death was about a month later, when I introduced Ed Ternan, the president of Son for Charlie, at the Twin Peaks Rotary Club in Longmont, Colorado. I got through the first few sentences, and then I began to weep and sob like a baby in front of 100 people, struggling to read the rest of the intro, as Ed stared into the Zoom screen, his face registering the same type of pain about losing his son, Charlie Ternan, to a single counterfeit pill.

Looking back, I realize that I could not have told my grievance story back then, because it was still taking shape. At the time it focused solely on loss and being wounded by Thomas’s death. It contained no hint of the biblical truth that God was, in fact, causing things to work together for good—for positive ends (Romans 8:28). I’ve become a much more empathic, caring, tolerant, and loving person as a direct result of Thomas’s death. His loss continues to have an enormous positive impact on me and countless others. The death of my only begotten son has also deepened my understanding of the price that God paid, with the sacrifice of His only begotten son (John 3:16).

So, the pain and grief of losing Thomas will always be there—always. But that’s not the whole truth. The person that I’ve become because of Thomas’s death, and as a direct result of the Spirit of God working through my dreamwork to heal and transform my wounded soul, has been woven into the fabric of my grievance story. James 1:2–4 affirms the truth that suffering has great value when he said, “Consider it all joy . . . when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. And let endurance have its perfect result, so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.”

Including my Romans 8:28 experience in my grievance story has added an objective perspective that widened the narrative from being focused solely on loss and acknowledged the victory that God has given me over Thomas’s death. I was tested and prevailed. I endured the pain and suffering of having the most precious thing in life taken away from me, and yet I am a better person for it. Given these insights and a changed heart and mind, I don’t know where God is leading me on the rest of my journey home, but I refuse to squander the gift of pain and grief that Thomas’s death has given me.

My silence about Thomas’ life and death is over. Finding New Life After the Death of My Son tells the whole story. It will be available for pre-order on sites like Amazon.com by June 15, 2024, with a book launch date of October 15, 2024.

My son Thomas Larson Bodnarczuk was “edgy” and stood apart from many societal expectations, exhibiting an unconventional type of wisdom that exceeded his years. He sought-out kids (often younger kids) who were being ignored, treated poorly, or marginalized by the “in-crowd” and befriended them, helped them feel accepted for who they were, and often these people became some of his closest and longest lasting friendships. Thomas was a self-professing Christian until the day he died. He was baptized at St. John the Baptist Episcopal Church in Breckenridge, Colorado on Sunday, April 27, 2003, and he made a public profession of faith on March 3, 2013, at First Presbyterian Church in Boulder, Colorado where he reaffirmed the vows that my wife Elin and I made for him as a child.

Thomas came home from working at Kohl’s department store at 9:10 pm on Saturday, May 1, 2021. My wife and I chatted with him about how things went at work and how he was doing in general, and then he went to his room. That was the last time we saw our son alive. Thomas went to his room and took what he thought was a prescription Xanax pill that he bought on Snap Chat for fifteen dollars. He was trying to relax, calm his stress, anxiety and play some video games after work. About 9:30 PM he ordered some food from Door Dash, but he never lived to eat it. The Xanax that he took was a counterfeit pill that contained fentanyl and that one pill killed him. He died in his bed at about 10 PM that night. I found his cold, lifeless body on Sunday May 2, 2021, when I went to wake him for our on-line church service.

Four days later, the police sergeant who was heading-up the investigation into Thomas’ death called and said they’d arrested the person who sold Thomas the pill that killed him. The preliminary toxicology report indicated that Thomas was poisoned by a counterfeit Xanax pill that contained three-times the lethal dose of fentanyl. Since our language shapes our reality, it’s important to be perfectly clear about what happened to Thomas. He was deceived by a counterfeit prescription medication. Thomas did not “overdose.” He was poisoned.

The Santa Clara County DA wanted to hold the defendant accountable for killing Thomas, but a 2021 ruling from the California Supreme Court regarding the charge of great bodily injury prevented him from charging the defendant in Thomas’ death. More specifically, the California Supreme Court had ruled that a conviction for providing a controlled substance to someone who subsequently suffers injury from its use is not sufficient to prove the person providing the substance inflicted great bodily injury. Instead, the defendant was charged with five felonies related to possession and transportation of fentanyl and Xanax.

The DA had to propose a sentence within the precedent of previous cases like ours, where sentences have ranged from a maximum of eight years in prison, to a minimum of no jail time, just probation. The defendant tried to rope-a-dope the legal system to reduce the consequences as much as possible. After seven court appearances, strung-out over a year and a half, the defendant finally accepted a plea deal of 3 years in custody, with the first year in county jail, and the last two years on probation. I insisted that a strong admonishment was placed in the sentencing records so that if the defendant does this again, he'll be tried for murder. But he was out in six months – to the day. The DA was an amazing help and support to my wife and I over the two-year period from arrest to sentencing – he was an island of excellence in the sea of mediocrity of a dysfunctional legal system.

The complete story of Thomas’ life and death is described in Mark Bodnarczuk’s forthcoming memoir entitled, Finding New Life After the Death of My Son, available worldwide on websites like www.amazon.com.