A Welsh hospice has translated the names of children who have died into Morse code, and used the songs of birds in their memorial garden to spell out the names, reports McKinley Corbley for Good News Network.
Sound engineer Justin Wiggan of the Tŷ Hafan hospice center works with hospital staffers who knew the children to select a bird for each child which best represents that child.
The birdsongs are played year-round in the hospital’s memorial garden. Each name is followed by a second of silence for each year that child lived.
Birds in the garden can hear the names being played in the garden and mimic them in the wild, and immortalize a child’s name.
More than 300 names have been translated into birdsong.
“Now, the bereaved parents can pop into the hospice memorial garden, sit down and just listen to the birdsong which is played all year round, and listen out for the song that represents their child,” says Harries. “And the thought that this song could be mimicked by birds in the wild means that the child’s name really could live on forever.”
Pauline Harvey, whose 10-year-old daughter Abigail was one of the children memorialized by the project, wrote, “I stood in the Memorial Garden gazebo listening as the individual birdsongs came from different areas of the garden. All the songs were very different from each other, unique and beautiful. … I felt overwhelming warmth and comfort. I was no longer waiting to hear Abigail’s name, that didn’t seem to matter anymore. She was part of the chorus, she was part of every birdsong, the silences celebrated each individual short life, but it felt like all the children were together in the song of each bird.”
