Photo: Katherine Wolkoff
One, the mother of a newborn who had died four years prior, found Hayes in a waiting area and talked to him about the importance of spending time with the deceased infant, a practice that has become increasingly common among parents in similar situations.
“I didn’t know what was morbid, I didn’t know what was normal,” says Hayes, 38, in this week’s issue of PEOPLE. “She began just walking me through the process. … It is a miracle she was there.”
Katherine Wolkoff
Once Laney, 39, was out of danger and conscious, the couple made the decision to spend the rest of the day with Oakleigh’s body.
Joining them in the hospital room for the experience were their 12-year-old daughter Lela, the oldest of their six surviving children, and close friends Craig and Laura Cooper. (Cooper is the inspiration for“Craig,”Hayes’ latest single.)
Paul Mobley
Says Laney, “If I had not had thatphotographer show up and do pictures, I would be devastated that I had nothing. We didn’t get moments with her living. … All we have are those moments of holding her and the pictures.”
Today, those photos are the couple’s most tangible evidence that Oakleigh existed. “I look at them every day,” Hayes reveals. “I sit and stare at them. On the [tour] bus, I’ll call Laney and ask her, ‘What are you doing?’ She’s looking at pictures. Wewould be so lost withoutthose.”
The tattoo was actually Laney’s idea. “He’d always wanted to do a tattoo, but there was nothing that ever felt important enough,” she explains. “This was the first time there was really something that was important enough.”
Hayes confesses he has a fear of needles, and that he actually passed out after the first four letters were inked. Once he came to, he recalls, “Laney was scared that they were just going to do ‘Oakleigh,’ but I was like, no, I’vegot to get the whole thing.”
The session ended up being “such a happy night,” Hayes says. His first tattoo also “will be my last — because Laney won’t let me get another one,” he jokes with a smile. “But I love it.”
“Which, of course, devastated us,” Hayes says. As his wife recalls, “He wrote, ‘Oakleigh, I never knew you, butI will always love you.’ ”
For more about Walker and Laney Hayes’ heartbreaking story, pick up the latest issue ofPEOPLE, on newsstands Friday.
Walker Hayes Family
Nine-year-old Baylor, she says, has been more talkative about his sadness while Beckett, who’s 6, is “too young to verbalize as well as the others, but he’s too old to just accept the facts. I feel like that’s been probably the hardest age.”
Sisters Everly, 3, and Loxley, 5, “talk about her a lot,” Laney adds. “They get that it’s final. They say,‘She’s with Jesus’ and, ‘She’s in heaven.’ ”
Lela, the oldest, has written a rap poem about the day Oakleigh died. “It takes you through the level of excitement, where she was so happy, to when she saw me and I told her what had happened and then her seeing her mom,” Hayes says.
Hayes isknown for his autobiographical lyrics,and says he’d like to record a song about Oakleigh — just not yet. “I have written some things,” he says, “but honestly, right now the song would be five pages long.”
One recent day, he was playing with a couple of the lines at the piano when Loxley and Everly joined him and started dancing. Inspired, Hayes improvised. “I wrote, ‘Speaking of your sisters, I think they like your song, because they’re dancing along to it while I’m writing it.’ ”
The work in progress will be finished someday, he vows. “I will definitely sit down when the right stuff falls out that I think comes even close to doing my daughter justice, and it’sbeautiful enough to sharewith the world about her and about this experience. … That song will come one day, but only when it’s supposed to.”
A national nonprofit organization, called Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep, is dedicated to giving parents a no-cost photographic record of their dying or deceased infant. For more information,visit its website.
source: people.com
