The Importance of the Memorial Kinder Walk

When I write about the importance of my Memorial Kinder Walk, it is because every parent who has ever lost a child:

an infant,

a baby,

a child,

a teen,

or an adult child

needs to believe their child’s short life was significant beyond the parent’s own heart.

Bereaved parents need to believe the time we carried our child,

the amount of breaths they took,

the amount of lives they touched …

mattered.

I absolutely believe Corrie’s time on this Earth mattered, and she has a mom who will write about her until I can join her again.

My Memorial Kinder Walk gives me the chance to honor other children in the spirit of Corrie’s ability to connect and include other children. Only the grumpiest person in the world without a heart could ignore Corrie when she entered a room. She always wanted to be a friend and saw herself always as a big sister rather than a little sister.

When I found someone else had put memorials of Corrie with pictures of her and loving words, including the words of her life, on the Find A Grave website for her cemetery plot, I realized the work I’d started had become more meaningful. I am now able to add pictures of children and babies’ sleeping places on their memorial profiles. There are many who do not have the number of pictures or memorials like Corrie does on hers.

I cannot stand the thought of someone driving by her hill and not knowing someone special’s memory is honored there until her gravemarker is placed.

Through her spirit, the spirit of children who have gone before her and the hearts of mothers who have shared in the nightmare:

I walk through Corrie’s part of the cemetery, and find the graves of children to tidy up and decorate. I do not move anything there, but Corrie also has some neighbors who have been there for longer, since newer graves are to the right of her or in what is nicknamed “Baby Land.”

I learn a lot about my Kinder Walk children just by spending a little time there.

Let us talk about Dan.

He is one of my seven babies/ children: Corrie, Benjamin, Alex, Megan, Wiley, Gary. I will add two-year-old, Thomas, and his infant sister, and a teen girl just three years older than my usual students, Alma.

You can tell when Dan died, his parents were shocked and devastated. They did not care what his grave marker cost. They wanted him, like every other parent wants for their child, to be remembered.

Dan was one year, nine months and sixteen days, as his marker states. His parents wanted his time marked; not just the dates of birth and angel wings present.

“For where your treasure is there will your heart be also …” reads the bottom of Dan’s marker.

As I stood there and my arms got sunburned in a way Corrie’s never did because she always tanned, I felt a presence. I was certain it was Edith, Dan’s mother. It was the kind of feeling when someone puts their hand on your shoulder.

Dan’s mother, like the others, loved him with such a force that had we the power, we would ensure our children’s memory surpassed the time of galaxies in whose history we are barely a speck. But the size of our love is so vast.

Every child, living or gone, deserves love.

Love does not mean spoil, as my son is struggling to learn, but it can create a sense of beauty even if those we love beat their wings in a place we cannot see.