Don’t miss this, either. From our friend Reid Forgrave: Early one summer morning in 2006, Eric Jacobs awoke with a start.
In bed beside him lay his wife, Heather, three months pregnant and barely starting to show. It wasn’t yet 5 a.m., and Heather was fast asleep. So were their four boys, ages 1 through 6.
Eric was scared, confused. He’d just had a terrible dream: That he died too young. That he left behind a wife and five children, and so many unfinished things. And that he needed to do something about it before it was too late.
He got out of bed. He crept past the boys’ bedrooms, down both sets of stairs of their split-level home in Ankeny, and into the basement toy room. He was surrounded by Legos, board games, cars, trucks, a plastic kitchen. His blond hair, or what was left of it after 31 years, was askew.
Then Eric Jacobs — a father who devoted every Sunday to family day, an evangelist who’d handed over his soul to Jesus Christ, a man whose life was filled with joy and promise — turned on the lights, sat on the floor next to the furnace closet, looked into a camera mounted on a Dell laptop, and clicked record.
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