Jonny’s Angels launches in Albany to support parents, siblings living with loss of a child

ALBANY — Kathryn Anderson doesn’t tell her story as though she belongs entirely to this world.

She tells it as someone who believes she has already seen what comes next, and speaks as knowingly of what is as well as what could be. 

The newly arrived Albany resident sits surrounded by paintings, children’s books and illustrations, all of them artifacts of a life she never expected to live. Once, she says, she was a numbers person — a financial consultant, a wife and mother whose world revolved around raising her children and caring for her family.

“I always loved God very much,” she said, smiling. “Since I was a little girl, I wanted to be a nun.”

Life, she says, had other plans.

She raised her children in church and homeschooled them for a time. Her two sons became valedictorians. They were kind, compassionate young men who loved people and loved helping others.

“They were just good eggs,” she said.

Then, about a dozen years ago, everything changed. Anderson became gravely ill.

For nearly three years, she says she searched desperately for answers. She went to doctors and researched possible explanations while simultaneously caring for her parents — her mother, who had suffered a broken neck and traumatic brain injury, and her father, who was battling Guillain-Barré syndrome.

“I was very sick,” she said. “I could barely take care of my children and my parents. That was all I could do.”

Eventually, she says she heard something she can only describe as a quiet instruction.

“Stop researching. Stop going to doctors. Just stop and be with me.”

So she did. She spent long periods of time alone, praying. Then one evening, she says, she felt an unmistakable invitation to accept an unknown calling.

“I said, ‘Yes’,” she reveals.

Not long afterward, she says she believes she died.

She doesn’t claim to understand what happened. She only knows what she experienced. Her former husband likewise believed she was dying. Then, in what many would describe as a near-death experience, Anderson says she felt a familiar touch on her left shoulder. Anderson turned toward the touch and recognized the person immediately. It was her grandmother, who had already died.

What happened next defies logic, but Anderson says an indescribable feeling of love overcame her.

“This love — it’s not anything that’s here — this incredible love just jolted through me,” she said.

“And she (her grandmother) wasn’t old. She was beautiful again. I could see her skin, her lips, her teeth, her hair. Everything.”

Then, Anderson says, she was suddenly somewhere else.

“When you get taken up, you’re surrounded by such love that it heals every broken bit of you,” she said. “I can’t explain it here.”

She says she remembers feeling completely healed. More than anything, she remembers love.

“He loves us so much,” she said. “All of this division, all of this us versus them, it’s all so silly. We are His children. He loves us so, so, so much.”

She says she returned from the experience with a different understanding of her purpose.

She began painting. Poems poured out of her. Books followed.

“I never did any of that before,” she said. “I had to figure it all out from scratch.”

The former financial executive suddenly found herself writing children’s books for adults, composing songs and creating artwork, all centered on messages of love, forgiveness and healing.

Then came another series of losses and divine messages Anderson says she believes were opportunities that allowed her to prepare for what was to come. Her father died. Then her younger brother. Then her mother. And finally, the loss that would change everything.

Her son, Jonny.

Anderson remembers September 2022 with startling clarity.

Jonny was a young Christian actor, husband and father. He loved filmmaking and his faith. He was away with his wife and daughter when Anderson says she felt something unusual during prayer. She became convinced his guardian angel was Gabriel and shared it with him, which he received with exuberance.

But the next day, her phone rang. Her son had collapsed. Her daughter-in-law’s voice was filled with fear and despair.

“They’ve been working on him. He’s coded. He’s been dead for 20 minutes,” she said.

Anderson says she prayed and, before long, heard that he had started breathing again as emergency medical personnel transported him to the hospital. It was there, at the hospital, she says she received another message.

“We need him here,” she says she was told. “There’s work to do. He’ll be with you to see it through.”

In her heart, Anderson said that was the moment she knew that Jonny  was not coming home. She held him and sang to him. It was the same song she had sung when he entered the world.

“I sang it when he arrived, and I sang it when he left.”

She says knowing where she believed God had taken Jonny made his death both easier and infinitely harder. The difficult part wasn’t believing he still existed, it was everything that he had left behind.

“The fallout on the family is the hardest part,” she said, explaining that some of the losses that followed made dealing with grief a complex and unpredictable experience that many will struggle to understand without having lived it themselves.

Anderson compares losing a child to pulling a piece from a Jenga tower. Everything else begins collapsing around it.

There is grief. There is rage. Relationships change.

Children grieve differently than adults. Spouses grieve differently than grandparents. Siblings often become invisible.

Her granddaughter, devastated by her father’s death, struggled to understand why the people she loved suddenly seemed so far away. Anderson said her surviving son became angry in ways she had never seen before.

“He’d never had anger before,” she said. “It wasn’t something I’d experienced with him.”

As Anderson struggled to move forward, she began discovering stories much like her own from other parents who had lost children and, in the aftermath, lost relationships. After some time, the initial support started to fail her and those around her.

“Through no fault of their own, people just think, ‘OK, it’s time. You need to get over this and move forward’,” she said. “But that’s just not how it works for many families who lose a child.”

Families start to simply stop speaking about the person they lost because they don’t know how to talk about them or who to talk about them with.

“When you try to talk about your child, people freeze,” she said. “They don’t know what to say.”

The result, she says, is profound isolation. Anderson says many parents begin to feel like strangers in their own communities. Even churches can feel unbearable for many parents struggling with the death of a child.

“You feel like an alien,” she said.

Anderson said she believes healing requires something most grieving families never receive. A witness.

“You have to have a witness to your grief to heal,” she said. “Someone who sees you.”

It was this simple realization that ultimately led her to Albany just two short months ago. The move wasn’t random. She believes it was Jonny’s idea.

“He loved faith-based filmmaking and admired the Kendrick brothers’ movies, many of which have roots in Albany,” Anderson said. “He had always wanted to live here.”

Without warning, Anderson says she began feeling pulled here, too.

“This is where he wanted to be,” she said, which was evidence enough for Anderson to uproot her whole life, leave behind friends and family and head south.

According to Anderson, she believes she has another mission, and she says she hopes to spend the rest of her life building it.

Her ministry is called Healing Waters Ministry, and she operates grief support groups specifically for parents who have lost children and their siblings. She calls the group Jonny’s Angels.

In addition to hosting a weekly grief support group for bereaved parents and siblings, Anderson offers one-to-one support sessions and a songwriting service in which she composes and records custom songs and lyrics drawn from the feelings and memories associated with a lost loved one. Anderson says the songs often aid parents during healing and beyond.

Eventually, Anderson says she hopes Jonny’s Angels becomes something much larger — a nationwide network of support groups, mentors and resources for families who have lost children, something she says she would have clung to during the dark days following her son’s death.

Anderson says she wants the support groups to function as a safe space for sharing memories and hopes parents will bring photographs and tell stories about their children.

She also wants siblings to have a place where someone sees them and recognizes their pain. Her hope is that through becoming part of this growing community, grieving families will know they do not need to hide their children from conversation.

Most of all, she wants parents to know they are not broken or beyond the reach of having joy in their lives again.

“There is still beauty,” she said. “There is still joy. There is still purpose. Grief changes you forever, but it does not have to end your story.”

Anderson says she believes the people who have lost children carry a unique capacity to love and serve others because they understand suffering in a way few people ever will.

“Angel parents — that’s what I call parents who have lost a child — are some of the most beautiful people I’ve ever met,” she said.

She says she hopes those parents eventually become mentors for one another and that the bonds they form with others on similar journeys will encourage them to volunteer, serve and build a stronger community together.

After all of her losses, after illness and heartbreak and what she believes was a journey to heaven and back, Anderson has arrived in Albany carrying a simple message.

“You don’t have to fix it,” she said. “You just need someone to sit there and hear you.”

For Kathryn Anderson, that is the work she believes she was called to do. To sit with people in the darkest chapters of their lives. To witness their grief.

And, somehow, to help them believe that love still has the final word.

For now, Jonny’s Angels support groups meet at St. Andrews Church at 6:30 p.m. on the second Thursday of each month, with additional meeting dates expected to be added in the coming days. For more information about Jonny’s Angels, Healing Waters Ministry or one-to-one grief support services, or to learn how to get involved, Anderson can be reached at (716) 289-1245 or by email at [email protected].