Lighting up the sky with lanterns to remember their little angels
By Aideen O'Flaherty
THE Tallaght skyline will be lit up this month with balloons and lanterns to remember children and babies who have gone on to be ‘little angels’.
The Light up the Sky event is now in its third year, after being set up by 21-year-old Jobstown mother Melissa Luttrell who lost her first baby through miscarriage at three months in 2015.
Melissa, who is now the mother of a baby daughter, said that after her miscarriage she was handed a leaflet in hospital with a list of counsellors, but that she wanted somewhere to go where she could recognise her child’s existence.
“At the end of the day there was a heartbeat there, there was a baby there,” Melissa told The Echo.
“The night I lost my baby I set off a lantern, and then behind the lantern it looked like there was an angel.”
This, Melissa said, made her realise that her child had gone on to be a ‘little angel’, and that she took great comfort in this.
These ‘little angels’ are now memorialised at the Light up the Sky event, where the name of each baby is read out as the lanterns and balloons soar to the sky.
This year’s event will be held beside Tallaght Leisure Centre on Fortunestown Way on Saturday August 26.
Attendees are advised to arrive at 6.30pm for a 7pm balloon and lantern release in coordination with other towns around the country who are also holding Light up the Sky events.
This follows a skydive that Melissa’s dad, Mark Luttrell, did in Edenderry in June in memory of the babies that people have lost.
He wore a T-shirt with the names of 235 ‘little angels’ during the skydive, whom he described as being “too good for Earth”.
Next year Melissa is planning to do a five-day Rainbow Walk from Cork to Dublin with her nieces Dana (15) and Shannon (11), where she plans to set off rainbow balloons at every sign marking a different county, in memory of babies who have passed away, as Melissa says: “after every storm there is a rainbow.”
For more details, join the Light up the Sky/Tree of Angels Facebook group.
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