70 Dancing Little Angels: Garden of Angels
by Kim Michael
Copyright February 2015
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Some people live their lives going from cradle to grave without leaving so much as a footprint, while others leave huge wakes in life as they pass. They are heroes of a sort. They are people who inspire us and at times even humble us; people who are capable of such indescribable acts of kindness and courage that it’s difficult for us to grasp how or why they do what they do.
Some years ago I read a Fox News article about the “Garden of Angels” and it affected me so profoundly that I promised myself that one day I would write about it and this is a story that has been long over due.
By the way I have included the original URL so you can also see the original article and pictures of the Garden are readily available if you search for the "Garden of Angels."
This story is for anyone who has ever loved a child, who knows how precious a gift they are, and that Angels do exist.
Debi Faris-Cifell and her husband live in a little town in California called Calimesa. When the phone rings it is a call for Debi to come to the morgue to collect yet another body of an abandon baby who has died somewhere in the three county area surrounding Los Angeles. They are tiny, no names, left in alleys or garbage cans to die alone, unloved and unwanted.
Debi goes to the morgue and insists on going in alone into the autopsy room where she raps the babies in a hand made quilt and in the quiet of that room she holds them, and prays over them, and loves them. She gives them first names that will be engraved on a white cross above their grave in a very special place she has made for them, a place she calls the “Garden of Angels”.
Over the years the Garden has had frequent visitors, people who believe in what Debi and her husband are doing and often adopt the babies, leaving flowers and toys on their graves through-out the year.
Until Debi began her work in 1996, babies whose remains went unclaimed were cremated, their ashes placed in a small cardboard box and after three years if they remained unclaimed, were buried with other John and Jane Does in an unmarked grave.
Since Debi began her work in 1996 she has buried more than seventy babies. Held seventy babies in her arms. Gave seventy babies names and gave seventy babies love. She refuses to let them pass from this world nameless and without being loved—even if only for a little while.
But just as she is committed to the babies who have been lost, she is equally committed to saving the lives of babies who are still in peril.
In 2001 Debi Faris-Cifelli, helped win passage of the law called the “Safe Haven Law” in California, which allows desperate and confused parents a three day period to leave a child at a firehouse or hospital, without fear of prosecution. Forty-six states now have enacted such laws and since the law took affect 67 babies in California have been safely surrendered, though Debi admits, no one knows how many have still been lost, and without an adequate awareness campaign many of these tiny lives are still in jeopardy.
To that end Debi travels across the country to lobby in states that have no such laws, all in the hope that one day the Garden of Angels will see its last angel.
She does all this with a three person staff supported by donations, grants, car washes, bake sales and compassionate people through out the country, but it has barely been enough to cover the costs.
Then in 2008 a miracle happened. Debi and her husband won the California lottery. They had only played it three times in their entire life, but they won $27 million dollars. For many of us that would be enough to just walk away from it all, but not Debi and her husband. They have already made plans for the money. They received a lump sum after tax of $9 million dollars and as you would expect some will go to their children, but the bulk will go into doing the work that is, and always has been, her passion. And because of the money her babies will live on in a new way, one hundred forty scholarships will be given out each year in the names of each of the abandoned babies she has buried.
I suppose there are critics who will say that Debi and her husband are deluding themselves into thinking that they can love and comfort a child after its life has passed; that what they do makes no difference at all; but it does. It makes a difference to me and probably anyone who has ever loved a child; and I am convinced that no act of love is ever lost, no good deed ever overlooked. Maybe not here on earth, but I would like to believe, like Debi and her husband, that somehow, someway, those babies know and they are saying “thank you for loving me when no one else did”.
And why do I think that? The odds of winning the lottery are astronomical, even impossible, especially if you've only played three times in your life. But I tend to think the odds are significantly less, when you have seventy dancing little angels in heaven…helping you.
By the way you can find the website for the Garden of Angels at: http://www.gardenofangels.org/
