This is for you, little man…
Becky’s post made me cry. It also spurred me on to make a donation to Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep. We might not have had the chance with Aodin, but the idea of supporting an organization that provides parents with something beautiful, some sense of peace and meaning, something that will one day make them smile through their tears…
Crap… cried again.
Anyway, I am asking all of you to step up and do… something. Anything. Make a donation somehow to support something that is meaningful to you. No money? Donate time. No time? Donate a craft, a work of art, a smile or a thought or a prayer. Reach out and help to make a difference in the world.
Leave a comment and tell me what you did. At some point in the relatively near future, I’ll pick one (maybe randomly, maybe the one that makes me cry the hardest…) and that person is totally getting a gift in the mail.
If you’re already doing this through Becky’s blog, tell me that too and then you don’t have to do it twice, though extra points if you do…
I’m also encouraging you to spread this around. Maybe we won’t change the world, but if we each change even a single moment in a single life, we’ve done great things.
Dude, thank you for spreading the word. Like I said in my email, this will be a holiday tradition, and one that I really like. If I can’t make things all better, at least I can do my part in what I have control over.
Don’t cry, Aodin is smiling down on you right now. I can feel it.
Shit, now I’m crying.
I love this idea. I couldn’t finish Becky’s post because I know I will be in tears. I got nothing more to add at this time. Thanks for sharing.
It’s so sweet of her, isn’t it? I mean all we want is for our children to be remembered and feel like they mattered.
I am donating to NILMDTS, or whatever the acronym is!
ps, nice new format! it’s swanky!
I too was totally touched by Becky’s post and have already donated to Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep… I have several friends that lost children and didn’t know about this wonderful organization when it happened. So, I’d like to do all I can to assure that someone, somewhere, is able to get a wonderful keepsake photo of their little angel.
And in the meantime I will continue to volunteer much of my time with the March of Dimes as I already do.
*and the tears are rolling down my face now so I’m going to stop right there*
I love this idea. You’re kind of paying it forward, making people more aware of it all, to encourage others to help out.
Hmm… I did a good deed last night. Went to a benefit and donated money to Children’s Hospital for a friend of mine who is running the Boston Marathon. She has a child that she is sponsoring who has a terminal illness. She’s looking to raise $5000 for the hospital, this child, more resarch, and hopefully one day… cures. I was only a small part of the donation, but… every little bit counts I guess.
I’m a total charity whore. Amongst many things I do photography for fundraising events for the local firefighters’ union. This has allowed me to give my time and skill not only to the good cause of supporting firefighter run events but also allowed me to support Habitat for Humanity as well as others.
I make it a point to help whoever I can, whenever I can and look for no reward other than that warm fuzzy feeling you get in your heart when you know you’ve done something right.
As a guideline I try to stick to my old battle plan of “Do one thing a week that will help make the world a better place”. I can’t fix everything sure, but I can fix somethings and one heart at a tiem is how we change the world isn’t it?
For some reason this made me think of when we had to put our cat, Livvy, to sleep. Livvy was special (aren’t all pets?) in more ways than one. I’m severely allergic to cats and one day when I was feeling lonely this cat shows up on our porch. I couldn’t let her in, allergies would do me in, but I did start feeding her. A few days later I started brushing her as well. It was warm enough in AZ that she could live happily outside (though she’d have been indoors with us if I could have brought her in) and she took up residence under part of the house. At least I knew she was safe and warm and dry when it did rain occasionally. She came to us almost every day for about six months. Then one day I noticed she was bleeding. We captured her and took her to the vets…only to find out she had cancer in her mouth…they couldn’t operate (a vet tech friend of mine said that generally they can’t because they’d have to take most of the lower jaw bone). We made the hard decision because we knew she was in pain (and I remember oddly feeling sorry for the vet because she had two grown adults weeping inconsolably in her office).
The reason why I was reminded of this was because of an act of kindness by complete stranger. When they let us spend time with her before they gave her the meds they had her wrapped in the most beautiful little quilt I had ever seen. It was so soft and handcrafted and very much had that ‘touch of home’ feel to it. (So the last bed that Livvy had before she went back to God was our arms and this quilt).
I asked about the quilt later on, where it had come from, and the vet said that a lady who was a customer at the office made them. She’d lost a beloved dog a few years before and ever since she’d made these quilts for other grieving owners who had to make the hard decisions. In the midst of my sorrow I marveled that a complete stranger could do something that may seemed small to them but was priceless to me.
I’m always too late. Egads.