Mark and I went to a Christmas Candlelight Memorial service tonight at Foster’s Funeral Home in the NW of Calgary. They put on a giant, free service every year at the beginning of December. When we arrived, I thought that I must have had the time or day wrong. There were cars and people everywhere — it was much bigger than I expected that it would be.
We walked into a huge chapel with hundreds of people. Many more were put into overflow rooms around the funeral home or lined the hallway outside. The Calgary Boys Choir was there, singing Christmas carols and songs of remembrance. At the front of the chapel, there were two huge Christmas trees lit with clear bulbs and loaded with glass angels. There were also two huge candleabras flickering in the dim light.
Each person received a candle when they entered and after a few songs and prayers, they were lit. The lights were turned down and the funeral home staff lined the aisle to pass the flame to each row of pews. Each candle was lit from the one before it, symbolizing the common humanity among people suffering from grief which can be overpowering, especially at Christmas.
There were more psalms read and more carols sung and then there was a slide show of all of the people that the funeral home buried this year. Our baby boy Kye was not one of the pictures shown. We have no pictures of him except for the precious ultrasound pictures taken at 12 weeks. By the time we had our 18 week scan, he had passed. It was heart breaking to see the pictures of everyone else’s loved ones and have nothing to show for our loss. I often wear his ashes around my neck in an infinity symbol and rubbed it during the service. I’m sure that he knows just how much he is loved and missed.
This funeral home offers a ton of community service programs to people in situations such as ours. Our baby passed away at approximately 20 weeks gestation. Foster’s funeral home offers free cremation services for babies who have died. They were very gentle and loving with us although we didn’t give them a penny for anything that they did. The service tonight was very touching too. And when we left, everyone was handed a glass angel that says “Forever Remembered 2008″ on it. They even let us take an extra one so that we could have one for each one of our children on the tree. I can’t even begin to describe how wonderful services like this are. When our baby died, we were thrown into shock and grief. We didn’t have any service for him at all. There was no funeral, no memorial, no grave, no head stone. Just a tiny bag of ashes that Mark tearfully brought home alone. I am so very glad we went to this service tonight. We are going to another Christmas memorial on Friday with both of the kids at the Children’s Hospital. This service will be specifically for lost children and will hopefully be family friendly. It has been so many months since he was taken from me. It feels good to finally memorialize him in some way.