Zara gets wish for own piece of paradise
WHEN young Zara Beasley Hennelly’s hopes of being a princess for a day were dashed her family and the Make-AWish Ireland team set about granting Zara a wish that would last a lifetime.
Zara, 12, has a form of cerebral palsy called spastic quadriparesis and is wheelchairbound and non-verbal. But she takes nothing in life for granted so when her own piece of paradise was created right on her bedroom doorstep it was a dream come true.
‘We thought a trip somewhere would have been nice,’ says her mother Orla. Zara has two sisters – Alex, 18, and the youngest, Willow, who is six – so excitement was at peak levels at the prospect of their first ever family holiday away.
‘We thought something like Disney where she would be a princess for a day. But Covid hit so we weren’t going anywhere.’
But virus or not, the Make-AWish team were still determined to make Zara’s day.
‘So Make-A-Wish said they could do something else for her,’ said Orla.
‘We had moved Zara downstairs about two years ago because we had been carrying her up and down the stairs for the first 10 years. She has a little area outside her bedroom so we thought of turning it into a sensory garden so she would be in a world of colour and chimes and sounds and smells.’
Orla added: ‘She loves the water feature because she is visually impaired so even at night you can turn off the lights and the water feature is lovely for her outside her door.’
Orla says wishes don’t have to be big and grand to change a life. ‘The trip would have been great of course, it would have been lovely but it would have been just a once-off; this is forever,’ she said.