I went to a baby’s memorial service.  If you follow me on Twitter and Facebook you would know that I’ve been asking for prayers for Shayna for the last while… well, she died during the week, and her memorial service was yesterday.

No mom or dad should ever have to say goodbye to their baby.

Now I don’t ordinarily blog about someone else’s story on my blog… it has always got me into trouble whenever I’ve attempted it… but I feel the need to talk about this.

You see, Shayna and her twin brother Davyn were born at 24 weeks, and he’s doing so very well in NICU at the moment.  The reason this particular story is so close to my heart is because I’ve known their mother virtually for years.  We met on a local online mom’s forum (Babynet), and I’ve been following her struggle for fall pregnant for years.  I was so so very pleased for them when they finally fell pregnant.

And one of the reasons I followed her story so intently, even though I haven’t really been active on the forum lately, and I think we’ve only met IRL a handful of times… because Kim was one of the moms that gave me SO much support when Connor was in NICU.  Her oldest son was also in NICU… so she knew what I was going through, and her and a few other moms gave me such amazing first hand support on BN during that time (and during all my miscarriages before that).

So, I had to make a plan to get to the service.  And although it was dreadfully sad, the minister was so very right when he said that Shayna may have only lived for 48 days, but she touched so many people in that short time… she really did live it to the fullest.

The most beautiful part of the service (apart from the speech by her oldest brother) was when the family let go of the 48 balloons for her 48 days of life.  And if you saw purple, pink and white balloons floating in the sky around South Africa and the world at approx 10:30am know that they were let go from other online moms who were following the story and thinking about Shayna.

No matter how badly my day has been going during the last few weeks, I’d log into their Facebook group (A tale of two tiny tots) to see if there was any news and be in awe of her strength and resilience…. and the family’s amazing amazing strength too… and know that my troubles are really trivial in the grander scheme of things

Anyhoo, I’ll be continuing to follow Davyn’s story on FB and BN, but I’m actually going to send Kim a message in a few days (once the dust has settled a bit) to find out if they’re keeping this story in another way.  It’s going to be virtually impossible to export from Facebook, and I’m sure they’re going to want Davyn to read it in future.  I think they should start a blog, and I’ll quite willingly help them to export the story… so that they can have a proper record of it.