I forgot to post this a few weeks ago b/c not only did it catch my eye, by tugged at my heart strings. Everyone knows that I have a brother who is special needs & I love him more then anything. It takes a special kind of person to be able to deal with the demands that a special needs child or adult requires. This story however shows what can happen when it is just too much to handle on little resources & little support. Here’s the story:

The night before a Bronx mom killed her 12-year-old autistic son and took her own life, she posted a heart-wrenching prayer on her blog saying her life was in God’s hands.”I sincerely repent of my sins, and receive Jesus as my personal savior,” Michaela Jackson wrote on It’s Mick’s World. “Now as your child, I turn my entire life over to you. Amen.”It was the final, fateful entry on the 37-year-old Jackson’s blog, which included photos from a Friday post showing her dancing happily with her son, Kenneth Holmes. Jackson and her son were found dead Wednesday in the bed of their Morris Heights apartment. Both had gunshot wounds to the head and a 9-mm. pistol lay nearby.Investigators believe Jackson was strained by the demands of caring for her only child. She left an anguished suicide note explaining her unthinkable actions, police said yesterday.”There’s a note that says that, in essence, she was overwhelmed by the child,” said Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly.”I’m sorry it had to end this way,” Jackson wrote in the note found taped to the inside of the Loring Place apartment’s bedroom door, said a police source. It ended with the words, “I love you all.”She also left additional notes with contact information of people who should be informed of her and her son’s death, including the boy’s father, school and her workplace.”Regardless of whatever happened, she loved him,” said the boy’s devastated father, Kenneth Holmes Sr., 35, a maintenance manager.Holmes wasn’t married to Jackson but remained close to her and had custody of his son every other weekend. He dropped off the boy at his mother’s home Sunday.”Everything was fine,” he said.”It cuts deep,” he said. “I’m thankful for the 12 years he was here on the planet, and the opportunities I had to talk with him and love him and be with him.”Jackson had recently been promoted at Montefiore Medical Center and had tickets to go on vacation in Jamaica next weekend, leaving family and friends dumbfounded by her actions.”She worked her way up from a very starting-level position, and was promoted now to a research assistant,” said Steve Osborne, a Montefiore spokesman. “Everyone loved her.”Friends and neighbors said there were no signs Jackson was about to snap.”She was a wonderful mother,” said Erica Deaver, 50, a longtime family friend. “She’d stand in front of a moving truck or a bullet for him.”Jackson’s uncle Anthony Cole, 52, a maintenance worker from Morris Park, said the family was struggling to find answers.”This is a tragedy and it hit home,” Cole said. “It hit everybody hard.”