Penny Trotti needed to get back to work. It had been 30 days of mourning her husband’s sudden death from a heart attack, and she was out of vacation time. “I worked there, I lived there, we were always there,” Trotti says of the storage facility she managed with Johnny. Some people are able to find distraction in returning to the office after a death, but for her, Johnny was everywhere. The night before starting back, she lay in bed praying, “God, I can’t do this.” That’s when the Lord reminded Trotti that He had been with her before Johnny died, and He was with her now; she’d never been alone. So the next morning she returned—crying, laughing, and trying to remember the good days.
Talkative and friendly, Trotti is winsome and quick to make connections with others. As her customers offered their condolences, she would tell them, “God’s going to get me through.” On one occasion, she mentioned a bit of comfort she’d received from a Dr. Stanley message, only to discover she was talking with a member of the church where he preached. This woman had a friend who worked in the church bookstore, and within days Trotti began to receive a steady flow of Dr. Stanley books. The deliveries continued for six weeks, until more than a dozen books had arrived. She said, “[My customer] even brought me Dr. Stanley’s Life Principles Bible, which I still use today.”
Through her grief, Trotti had chastised herself over her thoughts and feelings. But in following the counsel of the books, she discovered those reactions were normal. Realizing, It’s OK to ask God these questions; it’s OK to feel this, she says, “It really got me through.”
Three years after being widowed, she had the opportunity to encourage a coworker whose husband died from cancer within four short weeks. Trotti shared the experiences she’d had with the Lord as she mourned, and her friend later expressed that somehow it was always the right thing to hear. Trotti’s reply was, “Well, it wasn’t me, honey. That was just God helping you.”
Trotti is thankful to have “grieved well” and experienced God’s healing in such unexpected ways. Though another relationship was anything but anticipated, she found herself falling in love again and has since married Glenn Trotti. “Johnny was kind and attentive, a wonderful husband. But Glenn is equal, if not even more attentive. I have had great husbands.”
Together, Penny and Glenn Trotti manage a storage and rental facility not far from where she used to work with Johnny. “Looking back I’m like, Wow, I made it through that! God brought me through and just made me stronger,” she says. The Father of mercies and God of all comfort brought someone to comfort her, and she knows He’s called her to offer this comfort to other people who enter her door (2 Cor. 1:3).
Illustrations by Jeff Gregory
