A year after her daughter died of a sudden cardiac arrest in 2009 at age 28, Sharon Maekawa started the Hawaii Heart Foundation to teach others to save lives with CPR.

It was her way of dealing with the terrible loss.

“Otherwise I’d be devastated,” she said. “My life was taken away from me … I was looking forward to grandchildren.”

Kristin Maekawa-Claudi was her only biological child.

In an interview following Tuesday’s bereavement seminar, Maekawa said joining a grief support group also has been a lifesaver. Her daughter’s death was followed several months later by her father’s and husband’s deaths; then her mother died last month.

Maekawa said she’s following the advice of grief counselors and Louis E. LaGrand, the nationally known keynote speaker at the seminar, to find new purpose in life and develop meaningful personal relationships.

“Five months after losing Kristin, I earned my certification as a CPR instructor,” Maekawa said. Her foundation’s mission is to raise awareness of sudden cardiac arrest and teach schoolchildren CPR, supplemented by an automated external defibrillator, or AED.

“That’s my passion, so everybody knows what to do to save a life,” Maekawa said.

The new method of performing CPR is simple — it uses only hand compression to pump the heart, with no counting or breathing through the victim’s mouth, she said. Unlike a regular heart attack related to clogged arteries, there are no warning signs for cardiac arrest, an “electrical problem” that makes the heart rhythm go haywire.

It often hits young, healthy people who had no problems, like her daughter or high school athletes, she said.

Because Kristin was a special education teacher who died while at work, and Maekawa is a retired teacher, she is concentrating her efforts in schools.

“Nobody should die in school,” she said.

Maekawa said she agrees with LaGrand, known for his research on afterlife communication between loved ones, that the dead send messages to those who are still alive to comfort them through their grieving process.

“There are so many ‘signs’ and ‘coincidences’ which keep me believing that Kristin is leading me on this journey to educate others, and my (deceased) dad and husband are holding me up, giving me the strength I need to carry on. Signs like suddenly finding a butterfly flittering around my living room at 9:30 at night and watching it land on the AED (that she uses to teach CPR with) … or the one tulip blossom in the pot that leaned over to touch her urn last Easter while the others were all upright … so many connections that can’t be ignored.”