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He said, leave them be ma'am. That kid died, so your kids would have the privilege to play. He'd be honored to serve them.

That's Heather Gray Blalock and you'll hear more from her today on this special Memorial Day edition of Focus on the Family.

Your host is Focus President and author Jim Daly and I'm John Fuller.

John, today we want to pause and truly reflect with gratitude on all the brave men and women who have died so that you and I can experience freedom.

I mean, that's what Memorial Day is all about is to reflect what has happened. Freedom always comes at a cost. On Memorial Day, we honor those who have fallen and we want to say thank you to all of those families who have lost a husband or wife, mom or dad, son or daughter.

Maybe even a friend. Thank you for your loved ones sacrifice and our guest today is one of the many families who has sacrificed her husband David gave his life in Afghanistan in 2012 and we're going to hear her story today.

Heather Gray Blalock is a key spouse mentor for military families and has written a devotional book Faith Hope Love and deployment 40 devotions for military couples.

You'll hear more about that later, but you can order a copy right now at FocusOnTheFamily.com slash broadcast.

Heather, we are honored to have you here at Focus on the Family. Thank you.

I'm already in tears, man. Well, I have my tissues ready to right there on your lapel is a pin. It's the Gold Star pin, I believe it is identifying you as a spouse of someone who's been fallen.

Man, what does that feel like to give so much at such a young age?

Well, you know, it's it is an occupational hazard that sits in the back of your mind when when you have a spouse that's in the military, but no one can really ever fully prepare for that type of thing.

It's something that we all you know, I wish I didn't have to wear this wish I could I wish it was a club I had never been inducted into.

You had an experience you in your husband where he was training just to give you a glimpse of what might come, but he was in a training exercise.

You got the call that there was a problem. I think this was about seven years before he was deployed to Afghanistan.

But what happened in that training mission and what was that foreshadowing of emotionally for you?

Well, so my daughter was a year old. It was in 2005 and he was doing some some training for a different special operations career. So he involved like what they call a water confidence portion. They have to do a lot of strange things that most of us wouldn't do and a swimming pool.

And so he was just with one buddy and then they also have a drown proofing portion and so he actually did not reoxygenate properly. So his buddy thought he was drown proofing, which is where they kind of do the dead man float.

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