Tera Leigh

"Fortune Favors the Bold" is a phrase that Tera considers to be her personal motto. As such, she has lived a bold and exciting life. She is also willing to take big chances and turn little projects into worldwide endeavors.

The Memory Box Artist Program (MBA) program allows artists and crafters to use their creativity to benefit others by creating hand-crafted Memory Boxes to be given by hospital bereavement counselors and nurses to the families of newborn infants who die in the hospital or are stillborn. The program's sole purpose is to connect artists with hospitals in need of boxes. At no time do the artists send the program a box! MBA simply acts as the administrative "go between". They contact and follow up with hospitals to be sure that they have an active bereavement program, and that someone at the hospital will take responsibility for the boxes.

How it all started . . .

In early 1997, Rosemary Armesto sent a message to the ToleNet email mailing list (now defunct) that changed many lives. Rosemary told the group of a one-time project to paint memory boxes for families that lost infant children. In April of 1998, Tera Leigh, ToleNet's then-Owner, and asked if ToleNet would help publicize this program on an International basis. This list member's sister-in-law had lost a child just a week before term. She remembered Rosemary's message and painted a memory box for her sister-in-law. She related a story much like Rosemary wrote of. She was profoundly affected by the reaction of her sister-in-law and the hospital staff.

Tera began some research and learned that few hospitals have true infant bereavement programs. She learned about the difficulties for both the families and the nursing staff in coping with these tragic deaths. When Tera asked her mother, Marie Gemmil, to help and they began to call hospitals to find out if they had a program, the reaction astounded the women. Nearly every person they talked to began to cry when we told them we wanted to help! They heard horror stories from nurses who had to scrounge to wash a dirty bag in order to have something to give families the child's birth and death certificate, wrist band, footprints, etc.

Tera heard from women running support groups about the challenges of coping with such a loss. The thing that we heard over and over was that no one wanted to talk about it. It was too difficult, no one knew what to say. What the families craved most was to be able to talk about the child that they'd lost. Instead they heard, "it was for the best", or "you'll have another one". These boxes are a small way that we can help acknowledge the importance of the life these women carried inside of them. Through simple art skills, participants can create a keepsake box that the family may keep for generations. At the least, it will be a treasured memento of a brief life to a family who has few mementos of this too-brief life. Tera and the many volunteers she has inspired, think that this is a very worthy project and are proud to be a part of it.

Since the program's launch in June, 1998 at the National Society of Decorative Painters convention, the Memory Box Artist Program has shipped well over 100,000 boxes to hospitals around the world. The program currently needs 2474 boxes per month to support the hospitals in our program. We have 681 hospitals in the US, (including Alaska and Hawaii) Canada, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, Australia, and England where we have either sent or promised boxes.

Tera Leigh is a hero because she saw a need in a very difficult area. Few people want to talk about a child's death - and through the boxes, the family members have a representation of that child's life that enable them to start conversations that help them with the grieving process ("Look at what the hospital gave me, an artist donated it!") For most people, a pregnancy is just a bump in the mommy's tummy, but for the mother - and the family itself - they form a relationship with the growing child. When that child is lost, the family feels a profound grief but for friends and relatives it can be a little like talking about someone's "imaginary friend". Tera's vision has helped over 100,000 families through one of the worst times of their lives, and for that, I honor her.