Many of us have watched friends or loved ones go through a parent’s worst nightmare — the loss of a young son or daughter.

For some, the emotional devastation leads to other tragedies, such as alcoholism, drug abuse, divorce or suicide.

Pam Cope could have gone in any one of those directions. She felt herself slowly going crazy after her 15-year-old son, Jantsen, collapsed and died after a football practice a decade ago.

But finally, she found a way to deal with Jantsen’s death, and probably saved her own life in the process.

To honor his memory, she devoted herself to doing selfless good deeds — and sometimes putting herself in dangerous situations — to help poor children on the other side of the world.

“Jantsen’s Gift” is subtitled “a true story of grief, rescue and grace.” It is an inspiring memoir of how Cope and her family channeled their anguish into establishing a not-for-profit organization that rescues African children from slavery and human trafficking rings.

“I never thought that Jantsen’s death would lead me to grace,” Cope writes, “and it is my hope that nobody ever has to go through what I went through to arrive there.”

A contented wife and mom running a hair salon in the small town of Neosho, Mo., Cope felt like her life was just about perfect. She and her amiable, hard-working husband, Randy, deeply loved their kids, Jantsen and Crista.

Then, it all came crashing down on June 16, 1999, the day Jantsen died from an undiagnosed heart problem.

For months, it was all Cope could do to get out of bed in the morning and wallow in grief until the day was done. At one point, her suffering got so bad that she was hospitalized for sheer emotional exhaustion.

Fortunately, it all started to turn around for the Copes, and the healing process began with the charity of their friends and family.

Shortly after Jantsen died, the family started a charitable fund in his honor, and the Copes were astonished when the fund quickly rose to $25,000. The family had to find some good cause to spend the money on.

They had some friends who were raising money to help orphans in Vietnam, so Cope, her husband and their daughter traveled to Vietnam to investigate.

Visiting incredibly poor people living in squalid conditions was a life-changer for Cope. She began to realize that, as bad as her situation was, many other people had it worse.

One day, she watched a group of women working in the mud in a Vietnam rice field, and she noticed that many of the women carried infants on their backs throughout the exhausting workday.

“How many of these mothers had lost a child, I wondered. A lot, probably, as medical care in these rural villages was woefully lacking,” Cope writes. “But here, losing a child didn’t mean that a mother could stop working. She couldn’t just curl up somewhere, writing in her journal reading grief books. A day of not working meant a day without eating. What a difference from my experience. I couldn’t even handle one day a week at the hair salon.”

The Copes gave some of their money to the orphanage in Vietnam and also met a beautiful little boy on the trip, and adopted him.

Later, Cope traveled to Cambodia and raised more money to rescue children who were being bought and sold by human traffickers, who put them to work as prostitutes.

Cope started a new foundation, Touch A Life, and devoted herself to helping rescue poor kids from horrible situations. She and her husband made a deep commitment. They took out loans to rescue individual kids, and even sold their home —buying a much smaller home — to raise more cash for rescues.

Touch A Life also helps American families adopt orphans from poor countries. And in recent years, Cope’s main crusade has been the rescue of children in Ghana who were sold into slavery to work long hours on fishing boats.

Often sold by parents who cannot afford to feed them, the kids get up at 4 a. m. each day and spend a long, hard day on the boats, Cope reports. The kids get one meal a day and no days off, even if they are sick. They don’t attend school, and they sleep on dirt floors in tiny huts.

Cope established a close relationship with the Village of Hope, an orphanage in Ghana where rescued slave children get an education and decent living conditions.

Some of the book’s most harrowing moments are her visits to isolated Ghana fishing villages, where human trafficking laws are on the books, but ignored. In a great show of personal courage and determination, Cope somehow convinces village leaders to allow some of the kids to leave slavery and move into the orphanage.

She has rescued dozens of kids but still anguishes about the ones she had to leave behind. More information about her organization is available at www.touchalifekids.org.

The story is beautifully told and written by Cope and Molloy, a West Seneca native who previously helped Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., write “This Moment On Earth,” a book about environmentalism.

It’s a powerful story, and I defy anyone to read it without shedding a few tears. Especially impressive is Cope’s total honesty as she discusses her ugliest thoughts in the darkest moments of her life.

Also very moving are the occasional quotes from Cope’s personal journal, which she uses to open many of the chapters. She addresses her journal entries to her beloved dead son.

“Dear Jantsen, you are more alive than ever,” she wrote in January 2007. “I want to move mountains to help these children ... Your life ended way too early, but you still live through them. Love, Mom.”

Dan Herbeck is a News reporter and the co-author of “American Terrorist.”

Jantsen’s Gift

By Pam Cope with Aimee Molloy

Grand Central Publishing

320 pages,

$24.99