Monday the 28th of January, we went to meet with the Chaplin to finalise what we wanted for our daughters funeral. I know I keep saying it but how was this happening? We are supposed to be planning her arrival, wondering if she’s a girl or a boy, decorating her nursery and digging out all of the newborn stuff ready to meet her but instead we’re planning her funeral!
We spent a lot of time at the weekend making sure we had everything just right, that we were both “happy” with the choices and we felt we were giving her a good send off. That in itself is ridiculous, we haven’t even welcomed her to the world and we’re planning her send off.
Julia was lovely as always, she talked us through everything and gave us an Idea of what would happen and how the order of service might look but told us we could change absolutely anything we wanted to suit Nayely. We decided to have 2 songs, one to walk her in to and one to play at the end whilst people lite candles for her. We wanted one hymn to be sang in the middle ish of the service and I was going to read 2 poems but I’d read them as one. We asked if she would name Nayely for us as she’d not been officially named and she’d never get a proper christening. I wanted to carry her into the room and we wanted a photo of her up with her casket. She showed us what the casket would look like and showed us the scatter tubes her ashes would be put in.
I asked if I would be able to see Nayely one more time on the day and she said no, that the casket would be closed the night before so I asked if I was able to be the person who put her in and closed the lid, to put her to bed one last time. She called the mortuary and checked they would be ok with that, they said it was fine and I should call them to make an appointment and they’d make sure she was ready for me.
We left it that we would email Julia with the song titles and artists, the words for the poem and her name and meaning of her name. We told her that we’d ordered the flowers and we be at the chapel an hour before the funeral to spend time with the baby. She said she would email us the order of service so we could make changes if we wanted to.
After we’d seen Julia we went to the pub where Nayely’s wake would be held, we had tea with Sarah (godmother) and Charlie. We discussed the plans for the day to make sure everything was booked and set to go smoothly, Charlie had offered to take us to get scones and jam so we could do cream tea at the wake and she offered to set it all up for us on the day so that we didn’t have to rush back. Sarah said we could use whatever we needed to provide the cream tea, table cloths, crockery whatever. So that was that, nothing more we could do until Wednesday when we go to see the flowers. We could only have 20 people due to the size of the chapel so we put a post on Facebook to invite people to join us at the wake of they wanted to.
Later that evening Nathan and I were talking and it turned out that neither of us liked the scatter tube, it didn’t seem right for her forever home so we went online to look at urns – where do you even start, I know nothing about urns let alone one for a baby so tiny we looked and looked and we did find one that we liked but we had no idea about the size or anything really so we decided we would go to town in the morning and speak to the funeral director and see if they could help us make sense of the sizes, but for now it was time to settle down with the telly on and try to get some sleep.
Nayely Adelpha Foundation 