JANUARY 24, 2008 – PREGNANCY LOSS: OUR BABIES ARE JUST A CLOUD AWAY: DIANA GARDNER-WILLIAMS.

  Diana Gardner-Williams is the mother of a three-year-old son, two early pregnancy losses, and one stillbirth.  Nearly three years after losing her stillborn son Tanner, Diana set out to provide a creative outlet for parents to acknowledge and preserve the legacy of their “angel babies.”  Diana is owner and founder of Just a Cloud Away Inc., which provides specialty scrapbook remembrance kits to families grieving the loss of their baby.  Diana is also a professional landscape designer who has a passion for developing Memory Gardens to help those grieving the loss of a loved one.

Diana Gardner-Williams: 

September 28th, 2003
6 long months

2 pink lines

Excitement, joy, goose bumps

Jungle nursery

First kicks - May 29th, 2003

Baby showers

Contractions

Todd’s birthday present

Take a shower

Call the doctor

Excitement, joy, goose bumps

Waiting room

Small examining room

Bright, white fluorescent lights

Fetal Doppler

Silence

Todd

Oxygen mask

3 nurses

No words

Sonogram

Expressionless

Todd asks

No, no, no

Todd and I as one

My parents

My in-laws

No, no, no

Swallow heart

White rose on door

12 hours

Nurse Tracy

Baby Tanner

Silence

Tears, love, emptiness

Beautiful baby boy

Our son

5 pounds 4 ounces, 21 inches long

Tanner Lee Williams

Diana Gardner-Williams:  I was just born creative with a creative gene and sometimes it’s not a blessing because it’s hard to sleep at night because I’m thinking of ways to create memorials for everyone.  And why I wrote.  I wrote mother stories.  I did drawings of my son which are on the website as well.  My husband and I created a shadow box for our family room to place all of his mementos.  I journal.  I take pictures of the sky and keep a sky journal on days that I feel Tanner is with me.  It’s something that other parents can do because a lot of early pregnancy loss is you don’t have those tangible things.  There’s always subtle ways to include your children on your greeting cards that you send, a little angel, a little stamp. 

Diana Gardner-Williams:  One suggestion that I had made before was if money is an issue, maybe have a celebration on the spot where you’d like to have the garden and just invite people over and share with them your vision and just ask for donations for your baby’s garden.  And people want to do something and they really don’t know what to do when you lose a child.

Diana Gardner-Williams:  My two early pregnancy losses happened a long time ago and it just wasn’t the time so when my son Tanner died of a stillbirth, I was actually grieving three losses because I never really grieved my other two pregnancies.  And I have named my babies.  That is one gift that my stillborn son gave me is the acknowledgement of my two early pregnancy losses.

Diana Gardner-Williams:  You can’t obsess over that.  It’s just wasted energy.  Use your energy to memorialize and keep your child’s memory alive.  I know that’s easy to say now.

Diana Gardner-Williams:  I probably spent the entire month afterwards in an intoxicated state.  That’s how I dealt with it.  I started drinking wine at 9:00 in the morning and I passed out at suppertime, but that was my way.  After a month, the plants started coming in, and I was like, I have to do something, so I designed the garden. 

Diana Gardner-Williams:  If anyone intervened with me, I would have been very angry.  And my girlfriend says if you’re doing this six months from now, we’re going to get you some help.  But that was my way.

Diana Gardner-Williams:  It was our Christmas card that we sent out that mortified some people.  But what I did was the first year or Shivere’s first Christmas with us, I couldn’t send out just a picture of Shivere without feeling guilty so I superimposed them together and created the Christmas card and now I find out years later that friends and family were very worried about me back then, but they didn’t say anything, and I’m so glad they didn’t because it would have been World War IV.

Diana Gardner-Williams:  I am lucky to have supportive family and friends.  A lot of people are not as lucky, but I say do what works for you.

Diana Gardner-Williams:  So with early pregnancy losses, we don’t have all those tangible mementos.  So after my long bout with grieving – and I really was obsessed with finding out more about heaven – so I reconnected with the church, and I am so sure that I am going to see my children again.  So that was why I created one page, a heaven and earth page so that I can create one page with all my family members on one page – my children in heaven, my living child, my husband and myself – so that the entire family unit is together.  It’s a heaven and earth so that we’re not leaving anyone out because it was not an option for me to create a separate baby book for my children in heaven that would just be put away.  I wanted these pages to be included within the family scrapbook because they’re family.

Diana Gardner-Williams:  Because I’ve been through it myself, I know what gifts I enjoyed and what really made sense and it’s not just things that are memorials.  It can be practical things like money because usually the parents are taking time off of work and they’re missing out.  Shoveling, any housework, oh, how wonderful.  Food.

Diana Gardner-Williams:  Wow was it big.  Hallelujah!  Hallelujah!  That’s one of the greatest gifts Tanner has given to me is that after 17 years being away from the church, I found it.  It found me.  God found me.  I was driving around in December, our first Christmas, and I was like I need to find a place to pray and I was led to St. Pius X in Greensboro here, and I went in and I just wanted to go in and pray.  And there was a waiting line for the confessional and I was like oh, no, what do I do?  And I said okay, I’m just going to stay and I’m going to go for it and that’s what I did.  And the priest, the monsignor, was wonderful and I joined the church.  I’m part of the Garden Committee and I’ve met so many wonderful people and gone on retreats and I’m pretty active.

Diana Gardner-Williams:  God can take it, and I just went to a memorial service, a Christmas service for Tanner.  We do that every year, and the preacher was like, “God can take it but you know what?  His son died for us so He knows what it feels like.”

Diana Gardner-Williams:  Now that it’s years later, I can talk about this.  It really was difficult and you don’t really know how one another are going to grieve.  Who anticipates something so devastating?  So this really puts the test on your marriage.  Men are so different.  My husband would internalize it, and actually building our son’s memory garden was a wonderful outlet for him because he made those benches so level, the mortared stone used in building them and constructing them.  It was perfection and we thought about it because I wanted to get his garden done and finished quickly and it took a long time to build those benches but having an outlet for him to use his energy like that is wonderful.

Diana Gardner-Williams:  After a while he went to a few groups, but for Todd, talking wasn’t his thing.  And after a while I accepted that because you really have to work together.  It’s such a stress on your marriage and just stress on your different grieving styles that you have to respect each other because you both love your kids.  The love is there, it’s just shown differently.