The pain and suffering that goes along with losing a child is tremendous and something that likely never truly leaves a parent. So, you can imagine how that would be multiplied if you felt you were responsible for your own child’s death.
That’s what Jordan DeRosier is currently coming to grips with.
“I have a lot of guilt,” she told People. “What could I have done better? Could I have saved him? I will never be able to shake the feeling that there was something more I could have done to prevent his death.”
The Washington mother found her son 3-month-old son, Sloan, unresponsive in his crib one morning. The child apparently was suffocated by the blanket his grandmother made him which his mom placed in his bed.
DeRosier says the baby pulled the blanket through the crib rails and got himself stuck in it. When she found him in the morning he was cold with purple skin and blue lips.
A sight no parent should ever have to witness.
She took to Facebook to warn other mothers about how her son died in a post so that they too wouldn’t make the same “world-shattering mistake.”
“You never think it will happen to you,” she wrote. “You never think it will be your baby.”
She has since removed that post because people started to react negatively to her warning.
“More and more people started to say hateful, hurtful things,” she said in a recent Facebook post. “I started getting messages and comments that made me physically sick to read. It is so unfortunate that people think grief should fit their guidelines, that because my child died I cannot talk about him. My son’s life mattered. His story matters.”
Thankfully, her post has reached other parents who are now taking precautions to protect their children when they sleep.
Many parents said they have taken the blankets out of their infant’s cribs as a result of DeRosier’s post.
“I would’ve never known any different and I would’ve done the same thing with my future children,” said one commenter on Facebook. “You are saving lives.”
“Sloan was a light in the life of all who knew him, he was an absolute dream baby. It helps us to know that he is living on in the hearts of people around the world,” DeRosier told Good Housekeeping. “We have received hundreds of thousands of comments and messages letting us know that his story has already saved the lives of so many other babies. His life was far too short, but his purpose is now so clear.”
More than 3,500 babies die each year because of sleep-related deaths, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Now that she’s gotten the word out to other parents, DeRosier is focusing on her and her families healing process in private. We wish them peace.
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