WICS anchor Stacey Skrysak shared her story of loss with viewers of the Springfield, Ill., ABC affiliate last week as part of Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Month.
“In 2013 I delivered my triplets more than 17 weeks premature,” she said on-air. “We are blessed with one survivor, but two of my children didn’t make it. My daughter Abigail passed away shortly after birth. My son, Parker, he died just shy of two months old. It’s a club no parent wants to ever join, but for those of us angel moms and dads out there, there is help getting through the hardest days of our lives.”
“I was shaking the entire time I was on camera,” she wrote on her Facebook page. “But I’m so proud of this story and the opportunity to educate the public and raise awareness about Pregnancy and Infant Loss.”
Her daughter Peyton is the triplet who survived. She’s now two-years-old.
She told Yahoo Parenting she was hesitant to reveal the loss publicly because she didn’t want to make it all about her. “But my story is kind of well-known locally,” she said. “It’s kind of hard to hide being pregnant with triplets — and I thought I could either close myself off or embrace it, and I decided I’m going to be an open book with this community that’s helped me so much.”
“I remember thinking that my grief should be ending, and it wasn’t,” she recalls. “But someone told me you never get over it, and that grief doesn’t end, it changes.” Even now, she says, she’ll have moments of such happiness when Peyton reaches a milestone, but then think, “Oh my God, her brother and sister should be here with her.”
As her daughter continues to grow and mature, Skrysak says the “tricky part” will be figuring out how to talk to her about her lost siblings without putting pressure on her to uphold their legacy as the sole survivor. “It’s going to be difficult,” she admits. “But we decided early on that we want her to know she’s a triplet. We have photos of her brother and sister around the house and sometimes she kisses them. And we’ll do stuff to remember them — like we planted a butterfly bush — but we’ll let her guide us in finding ways to remember and celebrate them together.”