One mother won’t be paying a visit to Build-A-Bear anytime soon.
She received a “stab in the heart” from the toy chain when they refused to let her build a “Pay Your Age” bear in honor of her late six-month-old daughter.
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The company’s response to the grieving mom has gotten the internet fired up.
This is Ashley Guevara.
She’s a mom who tragically lost her second child in 2019.
She shared her story on Love What Matters, beginning with how she and her husband had a surprise pregnancy with their second child.
“We hadn’t planned on having another baby anytime soon, but at the same time we were excited to have a sibling for Carmen to play with,” she wrote.
Everything with the pregnancy was pretty normal.
In July that year, they found out that they were having another little girl. They decided to name her Dahlia.
“We thought it was just so beautiful and perfect. The perfect name for the perfect little girl.”
Since their first daughter, Carmen, was a high-risk delivery, they decided to do another C-section with Dahlia.
While the surgery went off without a hitch, Ashley knew something was very wrong when she saw the nurses speaking to each other.
“She was limp and blue. My heart broke when I heard them say she needed to go to the NICU,” she wrote.
While she was reunited with her baby a few hours later, that wasn’t the end of their problems.
It turns out that their little girl was born with a genetic abnormality that causes “low muscle tone, epilepsy, delay in eye contact, delayed development, and an array of other things.”
After fighting for her life in the NICU for three months, she was cleared to go home.
Sadly while at home, she caught the rhinovirus, which eventually turned into pneumonia.
Her little body couldn’t handle it — she declined rapidly. “We knew her time was near. We had our whole family come and visit her,” she wrote.
“The next day, around 3:30 in the morning, her dad and I held onto her while she took her last breath.”
Losing a child was gut-wrenching: “It was the worst day of my life,” Ashley wrote.
Just when it couldn’t get any worse, she received a “stab to the heart”.
It came in the form of a Facebook response from Build-A-Bear.
In her post, she explained how she had signed up for their “Pay Your Age” ticket.
She wanted this to be a bonding experience for her daughters.
“The day she died was the day we got the email that we had won the tickets for our girls,” Guevara shared. She waited a few days before asking if we could still use it “for my girls even though one was now my angel baby.”
“I explained how she unexpectedly passed the day we received them. It felt like the perfect thing to do in order to honor and remember her.”
The response that she got from the toy chain was not what she expected.
They wrote: “Thank you for reaching out and for being our Guest. We are so sorry for your loss.”
“This is designed to be an in-store experience for our Guests.”
“Therefore, the Guest must be present to pay their age. … Our thoughts are with you and we are sending Bear Hugs your way.”
“A simple no would have been okay with me, but their words felt like a stab to the heart,” she shared.
“They told me I couldn’t because ‘the guest must be present’. That was their response when I told them my daughter passed. Their words shattered me. I chose to not respond.”
She may not have responded, but random strangers sure did.
“I started getting notifications and comments on the post,” she wrote. “Then shares. People began messaging me. Somehow people got wind of their response and came to my defense.”
This resulted in Build-A-Bear reaching out to her via Facebook, as well as the company’s CEO.
“They offered to have Carmen come in and make a special bear for herself and Dahlia,” she shared.
But that still didn’t sit well with her.
“But honestly, after everything that happened, the bear lost its meaning to me.”
Although her heart still breaks over her daughter, she has comfort in knowing she’s not struggling anymore. “She isn’t in pain. She is free.”
H/T: Love What Matters
