'Angels Never Die'

Book Recounts the Courage and Faith of Four Sons Who Died of Rare Blood Diseases

To lose one child to an illness is terribly painful, but to lose four sons to rare blood diseases is more than most parents can even imagine. Gwendolyn S. McNutt and Henry L. McNutt Sr. have suffered this great loss and write about their trials in the book "Angels Never Die" (published by AuthorHouse).

Having grown up in a strict religious family, Gwendolyn finally got her heart's desire, her knight in shining armor. Gwendolyn Smith and Henry McNutt met at the town fair - it was nothing short of love at first sight. After getting married, Gwendolyn figured life would only get better. Little did she know that she and Henry would combine the same mutated recessive genes and pass them along to their children.

Not long after Laverne, their oldest daughter, was born, Gwendolyn became pregnant again. This turned out to be their first son, and he was named Henry Jr. Around his first birthday unexplained swollen lymph nodes became visible all over his body. It signaled the beginning of the terror of darkness that would repeatedly engulf the McNutt family.

In the course of only a few years, Adam, Randall and Carl were born. Each boy showed signs of something being wrong, and finally, after several trips to the hospital, an explanation came. Gwendolyn's boys were diagnosed with two rare blood disorders, Fanconi anemia and Wiskott-Aldrich syndrome.

In "Angels Never Die," Gwendolyn takes readers on a journey of these fatal diseases as they claimed the lives of her boys. She reveals the agony, the fight for faith and the pain of living as she watched her sons fight for survival. The legacy of her boys - from their faith in God to their courage against a disease with no known cure - will bring hope and understanding to other parents facing the illness of a child. The McNutts urge couples to take advantage of advances in genetic testing.

"Angels Never Die" is a testament of a faithful God even in the midst of disaster and the peace He can provide even when all hope is gone.

Before retiring to write this book, Gwendolyn McNutt split her time between caring for her four sons and two daughters and working at an organization she established, Reaching Our Community Kids (ROCK), which gives children encouragement and the love of a family. She and Henry are both Arkansas natives. "Angels Never Die" is their first book.