Tragedy struck for Catholic newlyweds. Months later, a miracle?

On the first day of their honeymoon, they had planned to sleep in, relax, then explore their Sandals resort in Saint Lucia.

But when Nate Kuhlman, 23, awoke that sunny morning, he couldn’t wait to hit the waves. He convinced Mari, 22, to go water skiing.

With a driver and spotter on the boat, there was only room for one of them. Mari watched Nate climb aboard, marveling at his happiness — and that he was really hers.

The boat pulled away, and Nate dropped into the water, then rose on the skis. He could ski barefoot and on one foot, had been on a show team in high school. Mari smiled as he slid along the sea. “That’s my husband out there,” she told another guest on the shore. “We just got married on Saturday.”

Her husband. She loved the way that word sounded, the way it made her feel.

They had met at a Catholic college, prayed together every day. Their wedding, she said, had been so holy.

For a minute, Mari stopped watching. When she turned back, she saw the boat racing toward shore, much too fast to be pulling someone. Nate couldn’t already have gotten tired?

Then she saw him on the deck. The spotter was giving him CPR. The driver pulled up to the dock.

Mari fell to her knees. She couldn’t comprehend what was happening. A crowd gathered. Strangers took turns pressing on Nate’s chest, breathing into his mouth. He never moved.

“Nate! Nate!” Mari cried, choking on her tears. “Come back! Please, please come back!”

A woman tried to pull Mari away, but Mari shrugged her off, staring at Nate’s stillness, praying, “Hail Mary, full of grace ...” over and over and over.

By the time paramedics arrived, Nate had been unconscious for a half-hour. Mari climbed into the ambulance in her bathing suit. She texted her bridesmaids: Pray for Nate.

She was crying on the phone with Nate’s mom in Oldsmar when a doctor told Mari there were no vital signs.

“Don’t give up on him,” Mari begged.

Nate’s mom, Heather Kuhlman, 52, couldn’t — wouldn’t — believe her only child was gone. Heather grew up in the Catholic church, where she and her husband, Gordon, devoted decades to leading youth groups, guiding people to God. She trusts the Lord, knows he never makes mistakes.

She also believes he works miracles.

Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead after four days, Heather reminded Mari, weeping.

Surely — if people prayed hard enough — the Lord would bring back Nate.

• • •

That afternoon — Oct. 31, 2023 — Heather explained her plan to her priest.

She, her husband, her parents and Mari’s mom would all fly to Saint Lucia to pray over Nate at the hospital, where his body was being held before an autopsy. They begged to have an hour. Doctors gave them 15 minutes.

Heather called it, “Our Lazarus Prayer.”

“I know it sounds crazy,” she wrote on Facebook. “Please join us in praying for a miracle for Nate.”

Even as a toddler, Nate’s family said he had a shine. He liked to be in the spotlight, Mari said. His charisma made it easy to make meaningful connections. He really listened, she said, and looked into you.

As his faith grew, he led Bible studies for his classmates, spoke at Catholic conventions, went on missions.

When Heather asked for help, hundreds of people shared her post. Families from the Guardian Angels school where Heather coaches physical education. Coworkers from the firm where Gordon is an accountant. Teachers, parents and students from Calvary High, where Nate sang in musicals. Doctors from the dermatology office where he worked. Lawyers at the firm where Mari had worked. All the friends who had celebrated at their wedding. Missionaries, priests, parishioners in Catholic churches around the world.

Heather’s priest, Monsignor Joseph Pellegrino at St. Ignatius in Tarpon Springs, told her, “If God wants to bring Nathaniel back to life, he will.”

• • •

Five days after the wedding, the bride rode to the hospital in Saint Lucia to be with her husband’s body.

The newlyweds had spent their first night in their new Carrollwood apartment, then driven to Miami the next night. The following morning, they had flown to the Caribbean to start their honeymoon.

Now Nate had been dead for three days.

Mari felt a strange excitement, buoyed by hope. So many people were praying with them.

Heather wondered if this was a test: Maybe God was daring her to trust him?

“OK, everyone, it’s time,” she wrote on Facebook. “Praying for the Lord’s glory to be revealed!! Know that in this battle, we are journeying in new territory.”

Two police officers stood in the room, guarding Nate. No one was allowed to touch him.

Mari knelt on one side of his bed, Heather on the other. They felt peace, a holiness enveloping them, like something was about to happen.

They prayed with everything they had: Please, God, breathe life back into Nate, raise him from the dead and grant him eternal life. Oh, St. Lazarus, please pray for a miracle for Nate. Bring him back to us.

Heather was sure her son would sit up and hug her.

Mari had brought Nate’s toothbrush and clothes, so he would have something to wear home.

They asked everyone around the world who was lifting them up to believe, really believe this was possible. They kept begging God...

Until, after an hour, they had to go.

How could our prayers have not been enough? Heather wondered. She knew she was supposed to trust God.

Before they went back to the hotel, Nate’s grandfather said, almost to himself, “What if the Lord answers our prayers in a different way?”

• • •

When Nate met Mari in the fall of 2021, they were students at Franciscan University, a small Catholic school in Ohio where Nate’s parents had graduated. He grew up in Florida.

Mari, from California, had “just wanted to party.” But her mom — and priest — convinced her to go to a Christian college.

She was at a picnic table, planning spring break with a friend, when Nate walked up.

“You should totally come to Florida,” Nate told them. Then he had to run. He was on his way to Mass.

The next day, Mari was subbing in for her friend at a volleyball game. There was Nate, on the team. His eyes were blue-green, like the ocean.

“He made me feel like he was really seeing all of me,” she said.

After the game, they talked for two hours. She complained about the cafeteria, said she had been surviving on Oreos and macaroni and cheese. “I’ll make you dinner,” Nate offered.

They took Chick-fil-A on picnics, played pickleball and croquet, watched “The Mandalorian” and Avatar. Nate serenaded her with his ukulele, singing “Godspell” songs. They talked about their futures, said things they’d never said.

Both of them wanted kids, especially a son, but not for years. Nate was studying to be a physician assistant. Mari was going to become a detective, or maybe a lawyer.

And they both longed, more than anything, to serve the Lord. Nate wrote long letters to God in his journal, asking for guidance. He and Mari started praying together in the mornings, going to Mass together every evening.

After three dates, they still hadn’t kissed. For her birthday, Nate painted her a picture: a blue sky with a little cloud asking, “Will you be my girlfriend?”

Then, for the first time, he reached to hold her hand.

They went to classes, to church, to Catholic counseling to make sure they were on the right path.

A year later, at sunrise, on the summit of a hike in Zion National Park, Nate proposed. They agreed to wait to consummate their relationship until after they married. In the Catholic tradition, they wouldn’t use contraception.

They chose their wedding date to avoid her getting pregnant.

On Oct. 28, 2023, Father Joe married them at St. Mary Our Lady of Grace church in St. Petersburg. He had known Nate since he was a baby and said their ceremony was one of the most spiritual he had officiated. The bridesmaids sang a hymn for Nate. The couple took Communion before they kissed.

Everyone “prayed their way through the wedding,” Father Joe said. More than 140 Catholics, half of them younger than 30. “So many very fervent, passionate young people united in their faith.”

• • •

Three weeks after Nate’s wedding, Father Joe presided over his funeral.

At least 1,000 people, including 15 priests, packed the church — the most Father Joe had ever seen. Hundreds watched online.

Nate’s family never asked why the accident happened. Who were they to question God?

But they wanted to know how. Nate had learned to swim when he was two. He was as comfortable in water as he was on land. To his mom’s horror, he loved surfing before hurricanes.

So how did he die waterskiing on that sparkly morning in the Caribbean, behind a small boat, not far out at sea, while his bride waited on the beach?

They hadn’t gotten the autopsy results or a police report. A certificate called “Death of a U.S. Citizen Abroad” said simply: “Consistent with drowning.”

“I don’t think I could handle being mad at God,” Mari said. “My whole relationship with Nate was about getting each other into heaven. Now he was there. I was confused. Are you kidding me, Nate? He was always so competitive. You seriously had to get to heaven before me?”

All through the funeral, Heather asked God to take care of Mari.

And she prayed to Nate to bless them all.

• • •

A few days later, on Thanksgiving, Mari woke early at Nate’s parents’ house.

She couldn’t bear to go back to their apartment alone. She didn’t want to return to California. She and Nate had planned a life in Florida.

She hadn’t been eating or sleeping. She had missed her monthly menstrual cycle, which she had been tracking on her phone for years.

Grief, she knew, could make your period late. According to the Flo app, she had ovulated days before the wedding, so she wouldn’t have been fertile then.

To “get that thought out of my head,” Mari had bought a pregnancy test.

She took it that morning before anyone was up. In the bathroom, she read the digital monitor: Pregnant. She stared in disbelief, then collapsed on the floor, tears of shock, fear, joy spilling out.

When she stopped shaking enough to stand, she got dressed and drove to the Dollar Tree to buy baby booties, to surprise Nate’s family.

“This has to be a miracle,” she told them, sobbing. “God himself would have had to kick an egg out.”

People spend years trying to get pregnant, change their diets and lives, drain their bank accounts.

Mari and Nate had only been together three nights.

She ached to tell him he was going to be a dad. Then she realized: He already knew.

When Father Joe heard the news, he was stunned. He knew the young couple had planned to wait, to continue their education, start careers.

“I looked at it as: How horrible! This young girl is having this baby without her husband,” the priest said. “But that’s not the way this family saw it.”

Mari and Nate’s parents were overjoyed. Maybe this was God’s answer to their prayers?

“God’s hand is in everything,” said Father Joe.

A professor at the University of South Florida was fascinated by the story. Derek Wildman, who teaches reproductive biology, said once an ovary releases an egg, “you only have a day or two, tops, when you can get pregnant.”

So if Mari was tracking her cycle and ovulated before the wedding …

“Maybe her math was off?” the professor said. “Or maybe, it’s very rare, but possible, that an egg dropped from the second ovary.”

Sperm live much longer. If Nate and Mari spent Monday night together, and the accident happened Tuesday morning …

The professor said, “She could have conceived a child up to five days after he died.”

While everyone was praying for a miracle.

• • •

In January, on what would have been Nate’s 24th birthday, Mari laid the ultrasound image and a onesie on his grave.

She posted a photo on Instagram. “Happy birthday my angel. … Clearly God had a plan bigger than anything we could have ever imagined. He answered our prayers, and prayers of those around the world, just in a different way than we had expected.”

At Easter, Mari revealed: It’s a boy! She knew Nate wanted a son named Raphael, after his favorite archangel. In Hebrew, the name means, “God heals.”

She decided not to go back to the law firm. She helped Nate’s parents repaint his old bedroom baby blue. They set up a crib and bassinet, filled the closet with board books and tiny shirts.

On the wall, beside a framed picture of Jesus, Mari hung their wedding portrait, so the baby would wake up seeing his dad.

When Mari gave birth to Raphael on July 18, she felt Nate there watching over them.

Their son has her dark eyes, and his daddy’s ears.

• • •

Mari bought a tiny bow tie for the baptism. Nate loved bow ties. She laced her husband’s white baby shoes on their son.

The ceremony was in August, in the same church where Nate’s funeral had been nine months earlier.

Heather had saved holy water, blessed by all the priests, that was sprinkled on Nate’s casket. She gave it to Father Joe, to anoint her grandson.

While the priest led more than 100 people in prayer, Mari gazed at the baby sleeping in her arms, stroking his face with her thumb.

“So now, through the sacrament of baptism, your child is about to receive the Holy Spirit,” said Father Joe. He called the grandparents and godparents to the altar. They lit a white candle, “The light of Christ.”

Raphael slept through the ceremony, until a man from the church stepped up to present rosaries. “For the mother,” he said to Mari. “And in honor of the father, Nate, we have a rosary for him, too.”

When Nate’s dad clasped the beads, the baby suddenly stirred, his right hand shooting toward the ceiling.

“The Lord has given us a new birth,” the priest said. “And eternal life.”