Mom’s Stunning Recovery at Site Where Her Son Died 8 Months Ago
The mother of a 17-year-old who died in a car accident eight months ago had her grief temporarily abated this week when she found her son’s cell phone — and on it, the last selfie he ever took — buried in the dirt near the crash site.
“Anything that was a part of him, I wanted to find,” Tammy Taylor of Landrum, S.C., tells Yahoo Parenting about her son, Skyler Powell, who was killed when he lost control of his car on the way to school in January. “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.”
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She knew that Skyler had his iPhone 4 with him as he drove to school that day, and that it was never recovered. So since then, Taylor says, she’s gone back to the site “30 times at least” to search for it. “And he was a very popular kid, so as soon as word got out that his phone was missing, everyone else was looking for it too,” she says.
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Then on Monday, says Taylor — who has two other sons, ages 6 and 16 — she finally found it. “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,” she recalls. “I got a stick and dug out around it. We’ve had snow, rain, flooding [in these eight months], so when I got it out it was full of mud. But I was dancing around and shouting, ‘Thank you, God, I needed this!’ and then I called my husband, John, and said, ‘I found the phone.’”
Skyler and a friend. (Photo: Facebook)
She brought the phone to the Apple store and that’s where she encountered local Fox Carolina news anchor Cody Alcorn, who happened to be there fixing his phone.
“You could tell she was upset, and she kept looking at me,” Alcorn tells Yahoo Parenting. “I figured she recognized me from the news.” He saw the mud-caked phone and asked her what had happened, and she told him she recovered it from an accident site. Though she never said it was her son’s, he had a feeling. “I asked, ‘Are you the mother?’ And she said she was.”
The two exchanged numbers, and later that day Taylor reached out to Alcorn to share her story, which later appeared on the evening news. “I’ve done a lot of stories,” Alcorn says, “but that one gave me hope.”
At the Apple store, Taylor says, a kind employee took the time to clean up the phone and put in a new battery, which allowed her to find a photo she’d hoped to see: Skyler’s last selfie, taken with a group of his closest friends just three days before he died. “It’s very dear to my heart,” she says.
Photo: Facebook
David Kessler, a grief expert at Grief.com, explains that Taylor’s determination to recover her son’s phone is understandable. “When we suddenly have less of our loved ones, we want so much more,” he tells Yahoo Parenting. “In a really beautiful way, she was on a quest for more — and she actually found more.”
Further, Kessler explains, when people lose loved ones, “they will sometimes create or cling to what we call ‘transitional objects’ — something you hang on to. She has this now to hang on to.”
He does caution that, once Taylor’s relief of finding the phone begins to fade, “there might be a period of let-down when she realizes, ‘I have it, but he’s still really gone forever.’” But still, he adds, “my guess is this will carry her forward for a while.”
Another healing force is sure to be what Taylor calls her new mission: getting out important messages about teen driver safety and advocating for stronger driver’s education laws to support that. “I don’t want him to have died in vain,” she says.
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(Top photo: KCTV-Fox Carolina)
