Only in recent weeks was Valerie Watts able to consider parting with her son’s crib. He was stillborn last July and never even got a chance to use it. As you can imagine, her grief is still raw and holding on to physical reminders of what she lost has been very important to her, if painful.
But in April, Gerald Kumpula, a neighbor in their small Minnesota town, saw the little bed during Valerie’s garage sale. Even though it wasn’t with all the other stuff she was selling, she agreed to part with it.
Happy with his purchase, he loaded it into his truck to bring back to his workshop, where he repurposes old beds and headboards and turns them into benches. But before he and his wife left the sale, his wife asked Valerie how old her son was, now that he clearly wasn’t using the crib anymore.
That’s when the Kumpalas learned they’d bought the crib of a baby who’d passed away. And that’s also when they knew that this crib would be coming back.
Gerald took the bed to his workshop and built a bench out of it…
When he was done, he returned to Valerie Watts’s house and gave it back to her in Noah’s memory…