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| Stacy Hayward, of Stacy's Creations Photography, is a volunteer for Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep, a non-profit organization which provides remembrance photos to parents who have a critically ill child or have a still-born birth. |
The hospital room is subdued with a sense of unimaginable grief. There are tears, shock and denial only parents who have just lost a newborn child can understand. And among this inconceivable sadness, Stacy Hayward quietly begins her task.
Hayward, owner of Stacy’s Creations Photography in Welland, volunteers for Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep (NILMDTS). NILMDTS is a non-profit organization providing free remembrance photography services to parents who have critically ill children or have suffered the tragedy of a stillborn birth.
NILMDTS services are offered worldwide and Hayward is the Welland/St.Catharines co-ordinator.
"NILMDTS is about telling that baby’s story,” Hayward explains. “Memories fade quickly. It’s sad how quickly they can fade, but having these pictures helps. Sometimes the parents will look at them and smile; sometimes they will be sad, but they are grateful to have them.”
NILMDTS photographers discreetly take professional photos of the stillborn baby or critically ill child and present the parents with a CD of the images.
Hayward admits the concept is hard for many people to understand.
“Until people see it, they don’t get it,” she says. “We don’t take pictures raw and then just hand them back. We know how to photograph the baby in a way that will be presentable and provide comfort for the parents.”
Hayward has volunteered for the program for about two years and says at times it can be difficult, but she knows it is her way of utilizing her skills and giving back to the community.
“People ask me how can I do it? But, how can I not? I just feel this need to help the parents. It’s my way of giving back. And NILMDTS does as much for me as I know it does for these families,” she says. “It really does. It makes me appreciate life. I am way more grateful now than I ever use to be. I am aware of things that can happen that other people just tend to not even think about. I know how much it means to the families and that’s why I advocate for it so much.”
She says it is always hard when she is called to the hospital for NILMDTS, but there is one session in particular which was exceptionally difficult.
“None of the sessions mean more or less than any other,” she says. “But once I had a set of twins and one of the twins was going to survive and one wasn’t. One baby was so sick we couldn’t take pictures of them together, so I gave each twin a different coloured teddy bear and took pictures of the bears together.”
She said it was hard to “watch a family grieve for one child, but at the same time try to be happy for the other”. It was also the “first time a baby passed while we were there.”
Surprisingly she says it is more emotional for her when the sessions are over.
“When I’m with the family I’m focused. I have to think of it as a job or else I’d be a sobbing mess. I’m a photographer in that moment. I’m not Stacy the emotional girl. I use that camera almost like a shield so I can focus on making sure I capture that moment. It’s harder for me once I leave and start to think.”
Hayward says no matter how difficult volunteering for NILMDTS is, she will never give it up.
“I want to turn my energy into truly helping people and it’s the way I can give back because my photography has been so amazing to me in my life. And I never thought that I would be a photographer. It literally just happened.”
Most people set out on a chosen career path, but Hayward’s natural talents surfaced through a series of random events and a career chose her.
“We were in an accident when I was 35 weeks pregnant with my son Branden and my tailbone broke,” Hayward says. “So when the time came to go back to work (after a year long parental leave) I was still having issues with my back and could not sit for long periods of time.”
She wasn’t able to keep her job because it required her to sit at a desk all day, so she started job searching.
“I just happened to be walking through Sears and noticed the portrait studio was hiring…and I ended up getting hired straight off the street as the manager.”
She had no previous photography experience but “fell in love with what I did there. I realized I loved the business side of it as well as the photography side.”
Unfortunately a few years later Hayward was told her son, who is now 7 years old, had Autism.
“The day I got the call about his Autism I quit. It changed everything. I thought that there was no way I could work outside of the home and be a mom to him. And for the first six months I didn‘t worry about income; I just concentrated on what I was doing with Branden.”
Hayward says she “put a little bit of thought into the photography aspect and running a business” but she “never really thought it could be what it is now.”
She began by doing a personal shoot for a friend here and there and then she realized she had found her calling.
“The more I did it, the more I realized I loved it. I never sat down and said I was going to do professional photography. It literally just happened. The work just kept coming and I slowly started to charge a little bit for it. And it just evolved. Every year since then it has just become bigger.”
In fact her business has become so big that “during wedding season I easily work any where between 70-90 hours a week.”
And while she appreciates her success she is “trying to find that happy medium” between her career and family life.
“I embraced the photography because I needed a job where I could still be with my family, but as it is getting busier it’s harder and harder to find the balance. The biggest challenge is absolutely trying to balance family life and business.”
Hayward believes she was meant to be a photographer .
“I truly believe everything happens for a reason and it all began with our car accident. It changed our lives and lead me in a new direction. I would not be a photographer if the accident hadn’t happened; and I would not have my own photography business if Branden had not been diagnosed with Autism.”
She feels photography is her gift and she strives to find everyone’s “unique story” with her photos; whether it be “showing the connections between people” in a family shoot or “preserving the memory” during a NILMDTS session.
And, says Hayward, that is what photography is all about.
Published in Niagara Life Magazine - May/June 2011
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