Many of us hold onto the quiet belief that we’ll live forever. But life has a way of throwing unexpected challenges when we least expect it.
One ordinary Sunday morning, Ryan Finley woke up, stretched, and gently nudged his wife, Jill, to wake her as well.
“I tried to wake Jill up — which is funny because I never do that on a Sunday,” he later shared.
He called out her name, but she didn’t react. That’s when Ryan’s heart started pounding. Something felt seriously wrong. He immediately dialed emergency services and began CPR.
When the paramedics arrived, they rushed Jill to the hospital, with Ryan following closely behind.
After running tests, doctors determined Jill had gone into cardiac arrest.
She underwent emergency treatment to stabilize her, while Ryan anxiously waited outside the emergency room.
Eventually, a doctor approached him with grim news, ending with a phrase no one wants to hear: “Start praying for your wife.”
Ryan knew what that meant. “When a doctor tells you to pray… it doesn’t get more serious than that,” he said.
Not long after, doctors informed him that Jill had slipped into a coma.
It was impossible for Ryan to wrap his head around it — just yesterday, his 31-year-old wife had been healthy and full of life, and now she was fighting to survive.
Over the next two weeks, Jill remained in a coma. Family and friends came by, hoping and praying for a miracle. One day, Jill’s cousin visited with a Bible in hand and read to her for an hour before leaving the book with Ryan, encouraging him to continue reading from it if he felt moved.
Ryan took the suggestion to heart. Reading scripture to his wife became a daily routine, one he clung to with hope that it might spark something within her.
After 11 days, Ryan returned home to consider what he had been dreading: whether to continue waiting or to follow the doctors’ recommendation and remove Jill from life support. The medical team was convinced she would not recover.
On the 14th day, Ryan made the heartbreaking decision to let her go.
Roughly five hours after the machines were turned off, Jill unexpectedly began moving and trying to speak. Devastated, Ryan had stepped out of the room, unable to watch her final moments.
That’s when a nurse came to find him. “You need to come back in. She’s speaking,” she told him.
Ryan was stunned. He entered the room expecting to say goodbye, only to hear Jill say clearly:
“Get me out of here. I want to go home.”
He couldn’t believe it. Thinking she might be disoriented, he asked her a few questions — about their pets, simple math — and she answered every one correctly.
Then she even said she wanted to eat at her favorite Mexican restaurant. That’s when Ryan realized — she wasn’t leaving him. She was coming back.
When asked what he believed brought her back, Ryan didn’t hesitate:
“It was God. A divine intervention. I truly believe that.”
Of course, Jill didn’t bounce back immediately. She had to relearn basic tasks — brushing her teeth, tying her shoes — as some motor skills had been affected.
But after getting what felt like a second chance from above, the couple vowed never to take their time together for granted again.
Jill even supported Ryan’s decision to remove her from life support, saying she wouldn’t have wanted to continue in a vegetative state.
