Severed Sacredness

“It’s Jessie. She’s hurt real bad.”

When fifteen-year-old Jessie Boone collided with an aspen tree 700 hundred miles away from home, no one was sure she would survive or what quality of life she would have if she did. A massive traumatic brain injury devastated her brain and body, and brought her parents to their knees in shock and grief. The only certainty was their faith in their Creator who, unbeknownst to them, had already placed the right people on the ski slopes, in the hospitals, and in the community that wrapped their arms and resources around this wounded child and family.

Severed Sacredness is the raw account of a mother’s journey through forty days of terror and anguish in acute crisis, eighteen months of grueling rehabilitation from a mute spastic quadriplegic state, and thirteen years of slow reclamations of capacities, life-threatening regressions, and cycles of grief and grace.

Even in the darkest forests, we are not alone.

If your beloved’s life hangs in the balance, or you are a friend looking for ways to support someone facing the unimaginable, this book is a medicine of hope for anguished souls, a map for chaotic minds navigating the healthcare system, and a field guide for finding or creating sacred moments of provision and presence in the midst of the severed and suffering.

A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots, a Branch will bear fruit. Isaiah 11:1

Lisa Boone is a Certified Hospice and Palliative Registered Nurse, advocate, spiritual director, writer, and speaker who brings the light of hope into dark places.

After more than three decades of serving her community as a registered nurse, Lisa found herself on the other side of the hospital bed, uncertain whether her fifteen-year-old daughter would survive a devastating traumatic brain injury. For forty days, she navigated the acute crisis, not as a nurse, spiritual director, or light-bringer but as a grief-stricken mother in the darkest of places praying desperately for God’s healing hand to prevail. 

Years later, when her daughter had recovered capacities beyond most doctors’ expectations, Lisa set out to keep her promise to write their story and offer hope to others facing the unimaginable in her book Severed Sacredness: The Miraculous Journey of Jessie Boone. 

Today, as the founder of Severed Sacred Tree, she writes and speaks about her own journey of learning to find the good within the hard, lean on the powerful Presence that went before and behind and beside her family, and dance in the darkness of tragedy. Seeking to empower those who cross her path and advocate for those who have lost their voice, she uses her twenty-five years of spiritual development and nursing to help others navigate the healthcare system and thrive on the other side of injury, illness, and tragedy.

A faith-filled seeker and spiritual being, her soul is fed by worship, artistic creations, traveling, music, nature, and the adoration of all living beings—from the trees and the creatures that find shelter in them to the remarkable humans that God places on her path.