BACK FROM THE BRINK
Buckhead author moves on from major life crisis to inspirational writing.
The story Courtney Pray Duke, 43, has to tell starts when she was growing up in Arkansas and met her future husband, Andrew. She was 8; he was 9. Eleven years later, the childhood sweethearts married, and over the next 10 years, life went cheerfully on, filled with three children and a Christian community in Dallas, Georgia, where Andrew was the worship pastor.
But life changed dramatically the day before Thanksgiving in 2012 when Andrew headed out for one of his regular bike rides, and Duke stayed home to finish holiday prep.
“It was a beautiful, clear day,” she says. “On his way out the door, we said I love you, and I remember hearing the garage door close. Then I went on with the morning, making sandwiches and cleaning the Christmas decorations we’d gotten out the day before.”
In the midst of that, she let an unrecognized number go to voicemail.
“It said, ‘Your husband has been in an accident; get to the trauma center at Kennestone Hospital immediately,’” Duke says. “I got the kids in the car, and before we could get there, I got a call from a family member telling me to pull over. That’s when I learned he’d been hit by a charter bus and didn’t make it. Our whole world just crumbled.”
A widow at 29, Duke says her husband’s unexpected death upended her life. “All my dreams, everything, came crashing down. The rebuilding process was disorienting and awful, awful.”
But a few months into the grieving process, Duke found supportive friends who attended Passion City Church near Peachtree Hills, and the draw of that community inspired her to move to Buckhead...
Read more in the latest issue of
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📝 H.M. Cauley
COURTNEY PRAY DUKE
courtneyprayduke.com
@Cprayduke
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