Last year, the night before Mother’s Day, Shannon Blount made a request. Devastated by the death of 3-year-old Ryan a little over a week before, she asked her husband if he could set up an appointment with a tattoo artist. Now she wears Ryan on the inside of her arm; the red-haired boy stands smiling and holding a red balloon.
A few weeks after getting the tattoo, she was sitting in a Monterey, California, park with her kids when a woman approached and mentioned Ryan. “At first I wasn’t sure what she was talking about,” Blount explained. “But then she tapped her inner arm and I looked down and, of course, there was Ryan on my arm.” Blount isn’t his mother, his aunt, or even a friend of his parents. She’s one of several strangers who have gotten memorial tattoos after his story went viral on Instagram in May 2014.
Ryan and his parents, Jacqui and Dan Saldana, lived in South Pasadena, California. They made regular trips to Disneyland, where Jacqui and Dan got engaged and Ryan spent the last morning of his life. That afternoon, while visiting a relative’s house with his parents, Ryan was hit by a pickup truck and pronounced dead at the scene. The family witnessed the collision.
In 2011, Jacqui started a blog called Baby Boy Bakery, where she shared recipes, crafts, and intimate dispatches from her life as a mother. The day after Ryan’s death, Jacqui’s friend and fellow blogger Alissa Circle shared a plea on her own site:
Today as I sat with Jacqui she gave me the honor of sharing her story. ...
They need us to rally
They need us to pray
to share
to love
to remember…
...Ryan.
Will you grab a picture from Jacqui’s Instagram feed, and post it to yours? Will you share words of encouragement and tag #RedBalloonsforRyan?
Other mommy bloggers followed suit, and Ryan’s story spread from small-time sites to ones with hundreds of thousands of daily readers. Strangers began sharing Ryan’s picture along with the hashtag, inserting him into their Instagram streams of home-cooked meals, school recitals, soccer games, and sunsets. Within a week, actors Sophia Bush and Tori Spelling had shared Ryan’s story, Instagram followers were releasing commemorative red balloons as far away as South Africa, and an auction benefiting Jacqui and her husband, Dan, had raised $67,555. Ellen DeGeneres brought Jacqui onstage during an episode of her talk show.
Instead of going silent after Ryan’s death, Jacqui began writing candidly about her grief on her Instagram account and blog. Her following has exploded. For women who haven’t lost a child, Jacqui’s posts offer a window into their worst nightmare, when something as simple a Band-Aid stuck on the sidewalk serves as a message from a deceased child. “Sleep is not the same,” she wrote in another post, a selfie taken with a backdrop of striped sheets. “We stay up late to avoid it. often it's filled with replayed images of the day our life fell apart. sometimes there is nothing replaying, my mind just goes dark. I long for the nights I can go to sleep with ease & maybe dream happy about my son.” Her supporters paint portraits of Ryan, share their DIY-Ryan inspired decor, and dress their kids in clothing emblazoned with Ryan’s image. Today, Jacqui has over 285,000 Instagram followers, and #redballoonsforryan has been used over 32,000 times.
Courtesy Shannon Blount
Jacqui’s followers are part of an online community of women — mostly white, mostly moms — who’ve become invested in Jacqui’s life and, in the process, connected with one another. Many of these women run their own mommy blogs or “closet pages” — Instagram accounts where women sell their own children’s gently worn clothing to make pocket cash. Their connections help them support grieving moms in a process that sits at the intersection of social media based mourning, the rise of web-based crowdfunding, and the propensity of parents to document their child’s every moment online. While people have long used online outlets to grieve loved ones and public figures, the intense, intimate mourning rituals for kids like Ryan are something else entirely. And while these rituals create a much-needed space for mourning in a culture that treats grief like it’s contagious, not everyone wants their child subjected to such celebrity. But once begun, it’s hard to stop.
“Even though it’s been a year since Ryan died, his death and Jacqui’s life are still relevant to me,” Blount, the woman with the Ryan tattoo, said. “I can’t imagine that’ll change.” She checks Jacqui’s Instagram account weekly. “When Jacqui announced that she was expecting again, I celebrated that news as if it was one of my very best friends,” she said. “It's one-sided, sure, but following Jacqui is kind of like having a best friend you don't get to talk to much.”
Jacqui’s fame is exceptional, but not entirely unique. I came across a similar mom a few years ago, in that familiar 3 a.m. haze, scrolling through Instagram, hesitating every so often over a particularly compelling image. I noticed that one account I followed, run by a mom who usually shares pictures of her own chubby-thighed toddler, posted a photo of someone else’s little girl. In the photo caption was the hashtag #penniesforpenny, and the news of 22-month old Penny Thomas’s sudden death.
By the time I’d found Penny’s photographer mom Jill Thomas’s account, I felt like I knew their family. Like Jacqui, her posts were consumed with her grieving process and memories of her lost child. I scrolled down until I hit the transition point in Jill’s feed, when photos of Penny’s gravesite and empty crib were replaced by snapshots of Penny with bedhead, Penny playing outside, Penny alive.
Seasons ticked by and I checked in regularly: I watched as the family relocated from California, where Penny had drowned in a pool, to Utah, where she was buried. They decorated the grave for every holiday; they got a dog and chickens; Jill got pregnant, had a son (“I had so much fear since he has been born that I would lose him too,” she captioned one post) and then later, another daughter. Her older children seemed happy in Utah: they named their home Penny Ranch and each animal for a word the nearly 2-year-old Penny had spoken before her death.
I wasn’t the only one following their story. “We don’t come from money, and funerals are so expensive,” Jill, a wedding photographer, told me over the phone earlier this year. “Coming home and dealing with the loss of Penny, it was like, And how are we going to pay for everything, too? It was completely overwhelming.”
Jill confided in a social media savvy friend, who quickly got to work. She set up a PayPal account for the Thomas family and posted the link, along with the hashtag #penniesforpenny, on Facebook and Instagram. They thought it would gain traction among family and friends; unexpectedly, wedding photographers who knew Jill shared the link on their popular blogs and social media accounts. That’s how thousands of strangers around the world found out about Penny; donations reached $31,000 in a matter of days, and envelopes full of pennies came in from states across the U.S. Two-thirds of the money went to funeral expenses and a tombstone. Jill used the final third to reimburse couples whose upcoming weddings she felt incapable of shooting.
“It saved us,” Jill said, now three years on. “I don’t know how we would have covered the funeral expenses without all these strangers’ help.”
But it wasn't just about the money. Reeling from the shock of Penny’s sudden death, Jill found support in the condolences of strangers who learned about her daughter’s life online. “In the days after Penny died, nights and mornings were the hardest,” she said. “At night I couldn’t keep my mind from thinking all these horrible things, and when I woke up I’d have to start a day all over again. So I’d scroll through Instagram, reading everybody’s posts and comments. To say it was comforting is really an understatement.”
To commemorate what would have been Penny's 3rd birthday, Jill launched a new campaign, this time to give back to others going through similar struggles. With the help of family, friends, and some strangers she’d recruited from Instagram, Jill made rings out of hollowed pennies. They raised $8,500. The next year, when people asked if they’d sell them again, Jill solicited work from artists and small businesses because they couldn’t keep up with the demand for rings. That auction raised $11,000.
As Jill moves forward in a life without Penny, the online community has remained, keeping her daughter’s memory alive. “The exposure that’s happened has been very healing for me. I’m grateful that people know her,” she said. “As time passes, it’s not always easy to talk about Penny. You feel like you’re expected to move on, others certainly do, so it always means a lot to me when people reach out to say they’re remembering her.” Plus, she added, it’s just easier to open up online. “I’ll be having a really hard day, grieving intensely, really close to tears, and my mom will come over and I won’t say anything. Later, I’ll post something on Instagram about how much I’m struggling and how much I’m missing Penny and my mom will call and say, ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ And it’s not like I didn’t want to tell her; sometimes it’s just hard to get it out when you’re face-to-face.”
Last spring, Rachel Fandale, a Detroit-based stay-at-home mom who runs a small T-shirt business on the side, sat her son down in front of the TV so she could work on a fundraiser for Asianae, a little girl who died after being struck by a car. Mirroring #penniesforpenny and #redballoonsforryan, Fandale and her online friends coined the hashtag #bowsforasianae and began posting pictures of Asianae on Instagram, calling for prayers, donations, and help in spreading the word after first hearing about the story on the news.
It wasn’t until a week or so later that Asianae’s father, Anton Thomas, became aware that people were sharing photos of his daughter on Instagram, after a friend discovered them while absentmindedly scrolling. (The families of Asianae Thomas and Penny Thomas are not related.) Anton, a San Bernadino–based sales rep, began to scroll through the 400 posts, populated by people collecting monetary donations and lamenting aggressive drivers under photos or custom-made graphics of his daughter. “Honestly,” Anton said, “I thought it was a scam. There she was, our baby, all over the place, and we had no idea who was doing it.”
While Anton’s suspicions grew, Fandale’s fellow organizer Nicole Jackson had been trying to track the Thomas family down. She explained that they planned to give all donations to the Thomas family directly. To raise more, she floated the idea of doing an auction. Anton hesitantly agreed. He found it bizarre that strangers felt so attached to his daughter, but Jackson seemed like “real good people.” Plus, the Thomas family didn’t have money to cover Asianae’s funeral expenses, let alone the hospital bills from the week she was in a coma before she died.
The photos of Asianae that spread on Instagram are blurry. The Thomas family doesn’t have an iPhone, a chic parenting blog, or the funds to dress their kids in pricey clothes. The crocheted ball jar cozies, glittery monogrammed wall decor, infant’s bow ties, and a toddler-sized shirt that reads “petite bohéme” in scripted letters auctioned off on Asianae’s behalf would never find a place in their home.
Asianae’s fundrasier didn’t spread nearly as far as Ryan’s, even though they died within weeks of each other and their stories were picked up by people in the same community. “I saw that Asianae’s story wasn’t getting as much traction as Ryan’s and it was really upsetting,” Jackson told me. “I felt like it had to do with Asianae’s race.”
“To see the difference in how many people were willing to donate hundreds of dollars or hours of their time for Ryan but wouldn't repost a request for prayers for Asianae’s family was stunning,” she said. She also noticed a lot of judgment directed at Asianae’s family. “Asianae’s mom would post a photo of her drinking a beer and Ryan's mom would post one of her drinking wine. One is acceptable and one wasn’t,” she said, “It was infuriating and totally unfair.”
Erika Hannah and her daughter Asianae Thomas
Courtesy Erika Hannah
Anton and his wife, Erika Hannah, have struggled with that scrutiny. They’re grateful for the $4,000 strangers gave them, but with the money have come malicious comments and the proliferation of Asianae’s image all over the Internet. “People write things like ‘You should have been watching her more carefully’ or ‘Two-year-olds move fast, why wasn't someone with her?’” Erika said. “That really hurts.”
After settling their two older kids in another room of their small San Bernardino apartment, Anton ushered me to a leather couch and sat down nearby. He said he likes to talk about Asia (which what she was called by her family), but Erika was clearly guarded. She stood by their dining table, busying her hands with tasks. After a few minutes, she came closer, leaning against Anton’s armrest. “Losing Asia was the worst thing in the world,” he explained, “but then we just lost all control of her photos, too. It felt like salt in the wound.” Erika nodded vigorously.
When I asked her about the hashtag, she said they had nothing to do with it. In the last photo she posted of Asia, the little girl smiles up at the camera, wearing a striped T-shirt and a bow headband that inspired the hashtag used to commemorate her after her death. “On our way to the party,” Erika captioned the photo. That’s the photo strangers now use to commemorate the girl they’ve never met.
“We wish the photos weren’t out there; we want her just here with us,” Erika said, gesturing to the walls around their living room, covered with framed pictures of Asia and her two older siblings. They keep her cremains on the mantle. “We couldn’t leave her in the ground somewhere — we had to take her home where she belongs,” Anton added. Beneath the mantle sits a gigantic plastic iguana. Asia’s siblings brought it home from school one day, hoping to scare her. Instead, she was delighted, and used it to freak out anyone who visited.
Anton and Erika find it comforting to keep Asia’s clothes hanging undisturbed in her closet and her toys all over the apartment, but her virtual presence disturbs them: “I’ll be having a good day and then I’ll get on Facebook and some stranger has tagged me in a picture of Asia and I just break down crying,” Anton told me.
When Fandale and I talked on the phone months after the fundraiser, she hadn’t heard how the Thomas family felt — she’s never spoken to them directly. “Yeah, I might have a hard time if photos of my son were all over the place and on T-shirts and stuff,” she said. “The thing is, you need the photo to get people to connect.”
