Casting call

Some people spend their whole lives wondering how they should use their time. For others, their calling is as clear as it is sudden. Kathy Taylor was already known as the artist behind Little Fingers and Toes, a business that makes customized clay impressions of children’s hands and feet. Moms and dads were excited to have a keepsake made of those small and sweet baby hands, so Taylor was busy.

Married for 10 years and a mother of three, she had lost a baby 18 weeks into her pregnancy and in the middle of a full life, she said she continued to grieve in part because she didn’t have any physical remembrance of her baby.

One day, while working on some impressions in her studio, she realized how she could help other grieving parents in the same situation as her: When a family lost a baby, she could take an impression of that child’s hands and feet and offer it as a keepsake.

Yet she wasn’t sure how to go about doing so.

“How in the world do you tell people that this is what you do?” Taylor said. “I knew I needed to do this, but I didn’t know how to make it happen.”

Then, Taylor crossed paths with just the person she needed.

Sheryl Hanna started working at Kootenai Medical Center in 1978. She is a staff nurse, a lactation consultant and the perinatal loss coordinator. She is there to provide ongoing support for women who lose their children during pregnancy or at birth.

Taylor approached Hanna because she wanted to donate money to Share Hope, a project that aims to create a memorial park for babies lost during pregnancy.

This conversation was the beginning of what would eventually become Impressions for the Heart, where Taylor provides hand and foot prints to grieving parents at no charge.

She’s been doing so since 2004.

Today, Hanna said Taylor tries to find out as much as she can about each situation in order to create an individualized and personalized keepsake.

Taylor said she wants to make each piece as special and unique as every child.

And the parents who receive the imprints find them tremendously helpful in processing their grief. Nikki Longwell lost her baby at 22 weeks, but before she left the hospital the nursing staff told her that she could come back in a few weeks to pick up her plaque.

Longwell, who had named her baby Faith Jae, said it meant so much to have something she could touch and see.

“The hospital gives you everything they can, but this was actually her,” Longwell said. She displays the piece with other impressions taken of her second daughter, Halle Jae, who is now 15 months old.

Taylor soon began to receive requests from people dealing with the deaths of older children, adult family members with terminal illnesses and critically ill children.

Taylor does her best to not turn anyone down.

She said she never knows how she’ll react when she’s called to do an impression.

“Sometimes I know the families,” she said, “and it can be very emotional and difficult. Sometimes it’s a child I’ve already done impressions for but then something happens to them.”

In the early spring of 2005, Margaret Boyd was spending a weekend at home with her husband, Bill Boyd, their 4-month-old baby, Ava, and Bill’s two older sons, Chris and Nick. One morning, Bill was discovered dead in his bed.

“He had coronary artery disease, but nobody knew,” Boyd said, about Bill’s sudden death.

Boyd said she was in such a state of shock that she couldn’t bring herself to see her dead husband.

A good friend had heard about Taylor and arranged for an impression to be taken of Bill’s hand. Then the friend brought Taylor over to Boyd’s house to add the handprints of Margaret, Nick, Chris and Ava.

Boyd said as soon as she saw Bill’s hand in the clay, she reached out to feel it. The lines of his hand, the shape of his fingers, the imprint of his wedding band pressed into the clay.

“It was Bill,” she said.

Ava’s tiny hand is pressed inside her father’s. Margaret’s is next to them, and Chris and Nick’s handprints are above. Margaret said the piece has been invaluable to the whole family, and has been a tangible source of healing and recovery for her.

“It takes a team to make this happen,” Taylor said.

She acknowledges all the work done by the nursing staff at KMC and Sacred Heart Hospital, and expresses her gratitude for Hanna and others who help coordinate working with the families.

“It’s hard,” she says. “It’s really hard. But in the midst of all this, it helps me to be a better person – a better mom. I’ll do it as long as I’m supposed to.”