A woman in Washington, D.C., emailed me last week about the heart-rending column I wrote about my niece’s stillborn baby.
Elizabeth “Liz” O’Donnell’s baby, Aaliyah, was stillborn on Dec. 1, 2020, after her heartbeat stopped at seven months’ gestation. Upon returning home from the hospital, empty-armed, the 30-year-old first-grade teacher received another blow — her employer, D.C. Public Schools, revoked her family leave because she didn’t have a birth certificate for Aaliyah. The Washington Post reported on her story at https://tinyurl.com/2f5myzkp.
“It ended up going viral, and I had thousands of mothers who had also experienced a similar situation reaching out,” O’Donnell said. “I had no idea stillbirth still happened so to see these people reaching out was a shock to me.”
She ended up starting a nonprofit, Aaliyah In Action https://www.aaliyahinaction.org/ to honor her daughter and offer comfort to other parents suffering the loss of a baby through stillbirth or miscarriage.
“We partner with hospitals to provide our self-care packages to those who experience any form of perinatal or neonatal loss,” she said. “We also ship our packages nationwide to anyone who requests one.
“I call these packages a support for the person who needs to make it to tomorrow because, in the aftermath, in those first few days back home from the hospital, you’re just trying to survive. Some days still feel like that three years later,” she said.
The boxes contain items donated by local businesses — fuzzy socks, lip balm, face masks, tea from the Dope Doula, lavender shower steamers from Joyful Bath Co., and a Smell of Love candle. The box also contains a Self-Care Choice Board offering ideas to help parents make it through the day and feel a sense of accomplishment.
Each package, which is worth about $60, also contains a book, or a couple of books, tailored to people who are hurting. Among titles offered are:
• Still Here: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Triumph After Stillbirth by Alishia Anderson.
• You Are Not Alone: Love Letters from Loss Mom to Loss Mom by Emily Long.
• When the Heartbeat Stops: Organic Accounts of Women Breaking the Silence Around Miscarriage by JaRonda Dockett.
• Grieving Dads, to the Brink & Back by a father, Kelly Farley.
• I’m Still a Big Sister by Brittany Day and her daughter, Eliza.
“Grief has no timeline, especially during the holidays,” O’Donnell said.
Aaliya in Action, which hopes to expand the number of hospitals it serves, accepts donations. Ninety percent of the hospitals receiving the baskets don’t have money in their budgets to pay for them. O’Donnell said she never wants money to be an obstacle to providing support for hurting families.
I admire O’Donnell for creating a nonprofit in her daughter’s name to help others in pain. Aaliyah may never have drawn a breath, but her legacy lives on.
PAC-12 and a Carbon Footprint
Nice to see the Washington State Supreme Court refuse to review a Whitman County judge’s ruling that gives control of the Pac-12 and its finances to those two loyal teams that never abandoned it.
I’m not a major sports fan, but the hypocrisy of these liberal universities abandoning a local conference to fly far afield to play sports astounds me. Their communities are taxing citizens to curb climate change and reduce emissions while their sports teams exponentially expand their carbon footprint to fly halfway across the country — or in the case of Stanford and Cal all the way to the Atlantic Ocean — to play games. Many weeks, players, coaches, equipment, cheerleaders, and support staff from the University of Washington and the University of Oregon will board planes to fly to the Midwest to play Big Ten teams, trailing carbon emissions in their wake as they rack up tens of thousands of additional air and bus miles. All for additional gains in glory, better broadcast deals, and more money.
Then they’ll return home and tell us to quit driving to protect the melting ice caps, even though we in Lewis County plant acres of Christmas trees and commercial forests that more than offset our carbon emissions.
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Julie McDonald, a personal historian from Toledo, may be reached at memoirs@chaptersoflife.com.
