Finding New Life After the Death of My Son: Grace and Forgiveness in the Age of Counterfeit Pills and Fentanyl Poisoning

A dauntless memoir about leaning into life after grief, Finding New Life after the Death of My Son is moving in its examinations of life, death, and faith. Foreword Magazine, Clarion Reviews

Bodnarczuk writes with touching precision… As he stares down the hardest questions of all—why?—the pages pulse with a real spiritual struggle, described with rare frankness and clarity, worked through by a thinker who never professes to have all of the answers but whose hard-won insights, in the end, will offer comfort to other believers facing losses that might seem unendurable. Publisher’s Weekly, BookLife Reviews

This is every parent’s worst nightmare. You go to wake up your eighteen-year-old son on Sunday morning for church and you find him dead in his bed. Only later do you learn he bought a single Xanax pill on Snapchat for fifteen dollars to calm his anxiety about the COVID-19 pandemic. He took the pill then ordered food from Door Dash, but he never lived to eat it. It was a counterfeit pill that contained over three times the lethal dose of fentanyl - that one pill killed him. Mark Bodnarczuk’s heart-wrenching memoir begins just hours into his process of mourning the tragic death of his teenage son. With indelible sincerity and penetrating detail, Bodnarczuk shares the intimate details of his grief, inviting readers into his moments of anguish, confusion, forgiveness, hope, and transformation. If you allow Mark to be the docent, he’ll lead you on a journey down into the depths of grief and pain that plagued his soul, and then back up through his process of finding new life and a deeper sense of meaning after the death of his son.

Mark Bodnarczuk is the founder and executive director of the Breckenridge Institute(R), a management consulting firm that focuses on organizational and personal transformation in high-tech research organizations. He is also an institutional program manager in the director's office of SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford University. At Stanford, Mark provides organizational development and leadership development services to SLAC's senior and middle managers on both the scientific and mission-support sides of the laboratory. He has a BA (Religion) from Mid-America Nazarene University, an MA (Theology) from Wheaton College, and an AM (Philosophy of Science) from the University of Chicago. Mark is the author of more than forty articles and four books, including Diving In: Discovering Who You Are in the Second Half of Life.