Valarie Watts longed to hear the coos of her newborn son coming from the room she spent months decorating. But when little Noah was stillborn, Watts was faced with the heartbreaking task of selling the items she carefully picked out for him.
Not wanting to part with the crib, she finally agreed to sell it to a retiree for only $2. One week later, he returned Noah’s crib and when Watts saw it, she was left in tears. Keep reading to learn about this heartwarming story!
Not a day goes by without Valarie Watts (now Hamblin) missing her baby boy Noah, who was stillborn July 22, 2013.
“All week I knew,” Minnesota’s Watts tells FOX 9. Explaining she stopped feeling Noah kick only weeks before he was born, she adds, “He wasn’t moving as much. I was very nervous.”
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A mother’s intuition is always right.
The umbilical cord became pinched in the womb, and Noah, baby brother to seven-year-old Neveah, was stillborn.
Garage sale
Almost one year later, Watts, 28 at the time, mustered up the strength to part with the items she had bought for Noah.
All except for his white crib that she excluded from the garage sale she had the next May.
Asked why she wanted to hold onto the baby’s crib, the grieving mom responds, “I don’t know.”
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Emotionally attached to that specific piece of furniture, a painful reminder of her loss, she hesitated when a retiree named Gerald Kumpula asked to buy it.
Gerald was at the sale with his wife Lorene, whom he shares 15 kids and dozens of grandchildren.
“His wife was there looking through my garage sale – at some of the baby clothes – and asked how old my son was since I don’t use the crib anymore, and I told her that he had passed in July,” Watts says.
And then she heard that Gerald, 75, was a craftsman who makes benches from second-hand headboards and footboards. “I was a little bit at peace with it because he’d be making something nice,” said Watts, who sold the crib to the Kumpulas for $2.
On the drive home, Lorene told her husband the story behind the crib that he just purchased.
“She was kind of hesitant, I knew that maybe she wouldn’t want to sell it, but then she did” Kumpula tells FOX 9. “We decided on our way home that this bench is going back.”
Memorial bench
One week later, Gerald returned to Watt’s home with a precious gift.
The man converted the pieces of wood from Noah’s unused crib and turned it into a bench.
“I started crying instantly,” a teary-eyed Watts shares.
Later speaking with Today, she says of the bench, “It’s beautiful. I thought, ‘There’s still kind people out there.’”
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An unused crib is a sad reminder,” Gerald tells Today. “A bench is more of a memorial. It’s part of that sad happening, yet it’s not a reminder like a crib would be, an empty crib.”
Helping her deal with her grief, the bench still sits by a corner bookcase that holds photos of Noah, his handprints and footprints, and his ashes.
Explaining the bench offers her a mixed set of emotions, Watts says, “I’m overwhelmed with joy that it’s not just sitting somewhere unused. Now I can sit in it, hold his bear, think about him if I need to.”
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She adds, “In a way, when I’m sitting in it, I feel comforted by his presence, even though he’s not here. It’s like a peaceful, it’s-OK type feeling. When I feel down, I can sit on the bench and I feel OK, everything’s going to be OK.”
Watts married Noah’s father Jimi Hamblin in 2014. Every year since her son died, she shares a sweet tribute for Noah on her Facebook.
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