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3.0 (2 votes)

Tucson- When a child is born too early, or too sick, to survive it's a devastating loss. Mom and Dad have a short amount of time to say goodbye in the hospital, then they leave... empty-handed and broken-hearted. Now, in Tucson, there's a program through the University of Arizona Medical Center that helps these parents cope. "Healing Hands" offers the parents photographs, stuffed animals, hand and foot prints and molds of their baby's hands and feet. Volunteers and donors even make it possible to dress the babies in special clothing, small enough to fit their tiny bodies.

Sherri and James Wakefield were on cloud nine, pregnant with twins, when it all came to an end in their second trimester. Babies Andrew and Jimmy. James tells Kristi's Kids, "if we didn't have those momentos, to at least kind of help us along, I couldn't imagine how difficult, more difficult it would have been to get on that path." A path to healing, that Sherri walks... gratefully. She says, "for us it means a lot. We would be heartbroken. And we hate the thought of anybody walking away completely empty handed... because that walk out of the hospital is so long."

Tracey Taylor helped with the creation of "Healing Hands." She tells Kristi's Kids, "we decided several years ago that something was needed to give families to take home who weren't going to take their babies home."

To visit the website, created for Sherri and Jimmy's sons... click here: http://memorialwebsites.legacy.com/JimmyAndAndrew/Homepage.aspx

To visit the Facebook page for "Healing Hands"... click https://www.facebook.com/HEALINGHANDSUAMC