Grieving parents: ‘buckle up your kids’
HIS toy dinosaurs are lined up on a shelf in his bedroom. “This one was his favourite,” his mom, Jenny Schmidt ( 28), says. “You can see how the paint has come off its teeth – this dinosaur ate all the others.”
She laughs as she reminisces about her three-year-old son, Mark, who spent many happy hours playing in this room.
Today their lively little boy is no longer around and running up and down the passages of their home in KwaZulu-Natal.
On Mark’s bed there’s a collection of car seats. There’s heartache and guilt in his mother’s eyes as she looks at them. “As a mom you know it’s logical to have a car seat in your vehicle, you know you have to fasten your child’s safety belt, but you don’t always do it and when it’s too late, you’re sorry,” she says.
On 27 May their world was turned upside down when Mark and his older sister, Zané (9), were involved in a horrific car crash. Mark wasn’t in a car seat, nor was he wearing a seatbelt, so he was flung from the vehicle and died later that afternoon in hospital.
“As a dad you battle with those guilty feelings all the time,” Marius (32) says.
He and Jenny run an internet café in Richards Bay.
“You’re thinking all the time, ‘If only I’d reprimanded him once more.’ Mark would often stand on the back seat in the car. I told him off about it a lot but you tend to think you hadn’t done enough.”
They didn’t keep car seats in their vehicles before but after going through so much pain and grief they now want to raise awareness about the importance of these seats, and also collect seats to donate to parents who can’t afford them. To date they’ve collected more than 20.
“These little seats are very expensive but they could each save the life of a child,” Jenny says. “I’d like to spare other parents our pain.”
FROM the moment Mark was born his parents had to struggle to keep him alive. After arriving prematurely at just 28 weeks, he battled with a heart valve that didn’t close properly. “We only realised that when he was 10 months old,” Jenny says. “He was always sick with pneumonia or some virus and was in hospital all the time. When he was a year old he weighed only 7,5 kg.”
As a result every day was full of worry and uncertainty. But then, with the help of hundreds of people who generously donated to radio station Jacaranda FM’s Good Morning Angels project, the more than R280 000 that was needed for
Grieving parents whose son died because he wasn’t in a car seat want others to learn from their tragedy BY JACQUES MYBURGH
him to undergo heart surgery was raised. He had the surgery in October 2014 at age one. “After that he rarely got sick,” Marius recalls.
At last the family could resume a normal life and Mark could be a carefree child. But then came the traumatic day when he was plucked away from them.
A family member had taken Mark and Zané on an outing. On the way home, he lost control of his car and collided with a truck. The kids weren’t wearing seatbelts and were flung from the vehicle.
“I got a call from the owner of the truck that there’d been an accident,” recalls Jenny, who was home at the time. “When I arrived on the scene the kids had already been taken away.”
Mark died a short while later at Bay Hospital. Zané sustained serious injuries, including a fractured arm, hip and thigh bone, but she was discharged from hospital 10 days later.
Marius (32) was en route to his parents in Potchefstroom when the accident happened. “I found out my child had died only when I got there. They hadn’t wanted to tell me on the phone because they were worried I wouldn’t be able to drive.”
At the time of the accident neither Marius nor Jenny had car seats in their vehicles and they admit they weren’t conscientious about ensuring their kids were buckled up with seatbelts.
Jenny says her son always fought and cried whenever they tried to strap him in. “He didn’t like being confined to one spot,” she says.
Because it wasn’t a habit to buckle up in their parents’ cars, they also didn’t wear seatbelts in their relative’s vehicle on that fateful day.
In light of their devastating loss the couple are now much more aware of child safety in vehicles. “When I go to fetch Zané from school I’m shocked by how many parents drive off with their kids not wearing seatbelts,” Marius says.
Jenny too now goes to great lengths to make neglectful parents more aware of the risks. “I’ve had flyers made with pictures of Mark and the accident. Whenever I see a car with a child not buckled up I climb out and hand the parents a flyer and tell them, ‘This is my boy I’ve lost, buckle up your child.’ Some people listen and do what they’re told, but others just rush off with their kids still not buckled up.”
Zané also does her bit for the cause. “There’s a boy in my class who said we could get his little sister’s baby seat – then we’ll have 25!”
All the Schmidts want is for their son’s brief life to still have value. On 28 October they’re having a fun walk to distribute some of the car seats they’ve collected to those who need them.
“Many parents would like one but can’t afford it,” Jenny says. “We want to donate seats to them and keep their kids safe.”
IN THEIR living room there’s a small casket with ashes that bears his name: Mark Benjamin Schmidt. Plastic dinosaurs stand on the wooden box, seemingly keeping watch over it.
It’s not the first time the couple have lost a child. During Jenny’s first pregnancy she was expecting twins. But after an ambulance ran a stop street in Potchefstroom and collided with the car she was driving, she lost one of them. Zané was delivered safely by emergency Caesarean.
“We always wanted two children, and after our first loss Markie arrived as a wonderful blessing,” Jenny says. But it’s not so easy for us to just have another child. It would feel too much like replacing Markie.”
“We’ll always blame ourselves for what happened,” Marius adds. “If only we knew what we know today.” S