Guest post by Melissa
I stared blankly out the window watching the freeway fly by in a blur. Tears streamed steadily down my face as I sat in the passenger seat silently with my heart breaking and everything inside me swirling around in a dark mass of shock, confusion, pain, and hopelessness.
My baby was dead.
I was only 12 weeks along but I loved that precious baby from the moment I saw two pink lines. I had my heart set on a daughter after my two sons. I just knew she was a girl. I dreamed of her face, of chubby baby cheeks and boisterous giggles…. Dresses and bows and pink. I talked to my tummy and ate right and took vitamins to help nourish her. I would look up the new developments with her tiny body week by week in my pregnancy books and tell my husband all about how that tiny body was changing within me. But she wasn’t. She was already gone and I just didn’t know it.
It was April of 2010 and as we later learned, it would have been only days after we had seen her wiggling and her heart beating away in a sonogram at around 8 weeks she had slipped away. No explanation. She had measured perfectly, had a strong heartbeat and everything seemed just right, but she died. And I didn’t even know. How can I explain the guilt and torment I felt for not knowing? I am her mother. I should have known. The feelings within me were overwhelming but one thing stands out when I look back to that terrible drive home from the doctor’s office. I was adrift, just lost and alone.
So very, very alone.
Only a few months later my husband and I would lose another sweet baby. We muddled along the journey through our grief and the process of trying to find some sort of peace and healing. There were ups and downs and I found my way through, largely in part, due to some babyloss mamas who blogged about their journey (and I was very lucky that a good friend of mine is a counselor and he was able to share some wisdom about the process of grief with me) and I discovered quickly, I was not alone.
I was, in fact, one of many. I learned that one in four women lose a baby. I learned that more of my friends than I could even count had lost babies, it’s just that almost no one talked about it.
There were a few blogs in particular that I connected with. One was called Carried through Grief (now known as Beyond Words Designs) where I poured over the story of Stephanie and her daughter Amelia. I would read their stories and weep and weep. For the babies, for their mothers, for all the loss and grief….and hope came too. Because those women made it. They went through worse than I was facing and they made it. So I would too.
I did make it. After our two losses I found my rainbow, a little girl with my hazel eyes and sweet chubby baby cheeks like I had dreamed of. We named her Victoria because we won. Then we were surprised with another baby only a few months after we had Victoria, a little boy born only two weeks after Victoria’s first birthday who we named Benjamin. But that’s not the end of the story, instead it’s the beginning of a really beautiful one.
In October of 2011 I realized that National Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day was coming up and I decided to do a small balloon release for my babies (who we had named jasmine and Lily). It was with that in idea in mind that I was surfing around looking for something to make it a little more special when I came upon the song Beautiful Things by Gungor.
That’s when it all came together in my head. I could see the whole thing, this wasn’t just about me or my babies. This was about ALL the babies, this was about ALL the babyloss mamas and families. In two days I grabbed some girlfriends and posted nonstop on every babyloss forum and message board I could find, inviting everyone to submit to me the names and dates of their babies for the remembrance.
The first year we honored over 200 babies.
We Remember You from Destiny in Bloom on Vimeo.
Last year in 2012 I wanted to do more, and I remembered that Stephanie Dyer, who’s blog and artwork I had stalked during the darkest time after my losses, had beautiful cards she had created that served as a memento for memory boxes as well as offering a message of sympathy and love on the back with resources such as still standing on the back. I contacted her (we had emailed back and forth over the years and she had done a custom painting for my daughter’s nursery) and we ended up talking on the phone and what can I say? Sometimes you have that rare where a friendship is born that seems to stretch back over years rather than minutes. This was one of those times and out of it We Remember You was born.
We switched from a balloon release to a one hour walk so we could draw more attention to the issue of babyloss and raise funds for the cards. We raised enough for 8,000 cards to be distributed throughout the country and even internationally and we honored over 700 babies on a remembrance banner and in a second short documentary. The cards we had printed were spoken for and a wait list started within only 3 weeks of announcing their availability.
We Remember You 2012 from Destiny in Bloom on Vimeo.
This year we want to honor even more babies, raise funds for double the amount of cards, and be able to file for our tax-exempt status to become an official nonprofit organization!
We would love to honor the life of your baby in our banner and video and hope that even if you aren’t able to attend the big walk in DFW Texas that you will walk with us on Oct 12 at 11:30 am central time from wherever you are. Feel free to recruit friends and family to walk with you and please take some pictures! We will share the location of your walk if you want (not required!) so other people can join you. We would love to see your walk, you can email them or post them to social media tagging them #WeRememberYou (and #babyloss #breakthesilence) and we will repost them.
We also invite you to be a part of this year’s documentary by taking video at the walk or at your long-distance/sister walk on your mobile phone (in landscape view, please) or of the questions “What does the We Remember You walk mean to you?” or “What is your story?” and submitting it via email to werememberyou2013@gmail.com. Please keep your clips between 10-35 seconds and answers to our questions under one minute, simply for ease in editing.
If you’d like to do more we are being sponsored by a nonprofit organization this year so we can accept donations and we also have T-shirts available! A t-shirt funds 125 cards…. which is really amazing to contemplate. One HUNDRED and twenty five women whose lives will be touched because a shirt was purchased (and they’re pretty cute, if I do say so myself).
More than anything Stephanie and I hope you will let us remember your baby with you and honor their life, and your journey.
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Our Mission Statement
We Remember You exists first to reach out to parents and families touched by the loss of a baby to miscarriage, stillbirth, birth defects, abortion, SIDS, and any other form of infant loss. We honor the short but important lives of these babies and honor the grief and healing of their parents and families. By recognizing these babies by name we acknowledge the impact they have had on the world.
Second, we exist to link with other organizations, sites, and individuals who have the same passion; creating community and unity while furthering their reach.
Third, we exist to raise money for the Memory Card Project, providing comfort and resources for women/families experiencing a loss in the form of a small card to be distributed by Dr’s offices, Hospitals and Birthing Centers and other organizations.
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