Sonya Gonzalez recently ordered a cake from the Rouses in Daphne for her daughter Abby’s 23rd birthday. When she got to the bakery to pick it up, she was surprised to learn that someone had already paid for it and had left a birthday card for her.

The card, signed “Janzen’s mom,” included a photo of a young man holding a fish, along with the hashtag “#liveonjanzen” and the dates 1994-2014.

Its message touched her heart – and later, at Abby’s birthday celebration, moved her family members as well. “It was really precious,” Sonya says.

“My son would have been 28 years old today,” Janzen’s mom wrote, explaining that n his memory, she buys a cake anonymously for someone each year. This year, Abby, the oldest of five children and a student majoring in social work at the University of Alabama, was the recipient.

“Abby has the biggest heart for people,” Sonya says of the daughter she calls her “bestie.” “I love her heart. She’s always giving and helping others. And she’s not much older than [Janzen] was.”

The card also urged Sonya to “hold your loved ones tight, be patient, kinder and tell them how much you love them. Spread love and joy!”

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“Every day, I’m shocked by the selfishness and rudeness of people,” Sonya says. “But God showed me that day that there are still people who are trying to be kind.”

She posted about it in a local Facebook group, where hundreds of others commented on it and said it brought them to tears. Sonya wanted to respect the mother’s privacy but also “wanted her to know how much it meant to us.”

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“We are so sorry for your tremendous loss,” Sonya wrote to Janzen’s mom on Facebook, in hopes that she might read her words. “We will love and treasure each day as you asked us to.”

Janzen’s photo now hangs on her refrigerator “so we can pray for him and remember to treasure every day,” Sonya says. “It’s a good reminder because we’re not promised tomorrow. We should be thankful for each day.”

‘I want to spread the love of my child’

Janzen’s mom, Sheila McCormick, did not see Sonya’s post until someone mentioned it to her a couple of weeks later. Since her son, Janzen Hembree, died in a single-vehicle wreck just half a mile from her home in 2014, when he was 20 years old, she hasn’t been able to look at Facebook much.

“Nothing prepares you” for losing a child,” she says. “It’s unfathomable.”

Six months after Janzen’s death, she found comfort and support through Compassionate Friends, a grief support group for parents whose children have died. She now serves as secretary of the local chapter. “Losing a child is a different kind of grief,” she says. “That’s why Compassionate Friends gets it. You’re in a group nobody wants to be in.”

Sheila got the idea of paying for someone else’s birthday cake on her son’s birthday when she attended an annual Compassionate Friends national conference. For the past seven years, she goes in person to various bakeries and tells the story until she finds a customer who shares Janzen’s birthday, February 3. “Some birthdays, it’s easy to find a cake, and sometimes it takes me all day,” she says.

This year, she found Abby’s chocolate chip cookie cake but almost didn’t choose it because it was only $14. Sheila was “having a hard day dealing with his birthday” this year, she says. She forgot to include a Chick-fil-A gift card, as she usually does because Janzen loved eating there, and she mistakenly wrote in the card that it would have been her son’s 28th birthday when he would have been 29.

Sheila was delighted to learn that the card made such an impression on the Gonzalez family. “My main thing is that I want to spread the love of my child,” she says.

Buying someone’s cake anonymously is just one way she honors her son’s memory. “I find a child at Christmas and spend money I would have spent on my son on someone else,” she says.

Meanwhile, the most gratifying thing for her is to hear her son’s name spoken out loud. When she orders a coffee at Starbucks, she gives the name “Janzen,” just to hear it called. Her family gives “Janzen” as the name when they go out to eat. “We do it everywhere we go,” she says. “The greatest gift a mother can have is to hear that name.”

She also has two “little blessings” in her life: her oldest son, Joshua, and Janzen’s best friend both named their sons after Janzen.

Like Sonya’s daughter Abby, Sheila’s son Janzen “had the biggest heart,” she says. “From the day he was born, he smiled. He smiled all the time and was happy” – even when, from the ages of 1 to 4½, he ran high fevers and was later diagnosed with a diseased kidney. “When he walked into a room, you knew it. He touched so many souls.”

Through his mother’s acts of kindness, he continues to do so.

Read about more amazing Alabamians:

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