On the 2nd September 2017, my sister katie, her partner jayne, Ed McKay and I, are doing a sponsored spin bike ride, for 280 miles. This journey is the distance to Cornwall, as this is a special place for my best friend Rachy and her family.  

Since the loss of Alex, who was born asleep on Monday 7th November 2016 and watching my best friend grieve, I really wanted to do something to remember him by and to contribute towards his legacy. After a chat one night, we thought this would be a suitable challenge for us all, to raise awareness of still birth and to help a wonderful charity.

We all want to make sure that Alex's life means something, and by raising money in his name we hope to help other families dealing with the devastating loss of a child. 

The reason why -

Kerry has asked me to write something to describe how the 4Louis memory box helped us when our son, Alex was born sleeping in November. It’s so hard to put into words how much the box and its thoughtful contents meant to us at the time. All I can say is that my fear of anything happening to the box is so great that I have seriously debated buying a fireproof safe for it. This may seem over the top to most but its all we have of our precious little boy. The majority of parents get to bring their beautiful babies home and start a lifetime of making memories. We had to cram a lifetime into three short days and fit what we could into our 4Louis memory box.

In the immediate aftermath of Alex being born we were numb, confused and inconsolable, totally overcome with grief. We were struggling to understand how a perfectly healthy baby who was eight days overdue could just die without any warning. We’d hardly even heard of stillbirth and we certainly didn’t know what was expected of us in the hospital. We had no idea that we could stay with Alex and try to make memories before we had to leave him. The 4Louis box gave us some direction and ideas of the things we could do at the exact moment when we needed it most. I doubt that through our grief we would have thought to take a lock of Alex’s hair or his hand and footprints, but the 4Louis box contained all of the things we needed to do that. The box contained so many thoughtful things: a book; cards; candles; a balloon to send a message to heaven; two teddy bears, one for us and one for Alex.

I know that without the box the depths of our grief would feel even deeper if we were to look back at our time with Alex and there hadn’t been a memory box for us. We don’t have a lot of our little boy to keep with us forever but what we do have is mostly thanks to 4Louis and words will never be enough to describe how grateful we are for that. 

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