by Laura Galileo

Created on: April 03, 2007   Last Updated: October 31, 2008

My brother and his wife had their second child at home. His wife went into labor and had probably one of the most painless births I had ever heard of. She gave birth in less than a half hour to Shawn Michael. He was a healthy baby. No low birth weight or any other complications. He was completely healthy. As with their first child, he was also breast-fed. He had a healthy appetite and showed no signs that anything was wrong. One morning the day before he was to be 1 month old, he overslept. His mother went into his room to wake him up only to find that he would never wake up again. Shawn was a victim of SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome).

Loss of a baby is the most tragic and heartbreaking thing. Add to it that after calling 911 a news crew showed up at their door. The first thing this crew probably wanted to do was either make it look like my brother and his wife were horrible people, or just get ratings for getting people to feel sad. This news crew wanted to be "first" with the story. Well, the camera man almost wound up with a camera lodged up his butt. The police got in the news crews face and made them leave. How could they do something at such a tragic time?

There was more heartache to follow. It's bad enough to know your baby is dead but to then have to hear about autopsy and other things like that. I don't know how my sister-in-law survived. SIDS affects an entire family. Everyone in the family could do nothing but wonder what could have been done to prevent it. We read every article we could find on the subject to find out what went wrong. The most important thing though was to be there for the parents to offer support. Just being there to listen and give encouragement can help a family though this.

This all took place in 1986. He was born in January and gone in February. They had another child but then the marriage didn't survive. They eventually divorced. My brother never really recovered from it. He will never talk about it. He buried the feelings deep inside where he feels they will never hurt him again. It's not really his fault. Not everyone can deal with something so tragic. He basically vanished from his surviving kids life. My niece and nephew are now grown and successful and my brother missed out on it all.

My brother and his wife were non-smokers, they didn't use drugs and Shawn wasn't a low birth weight baby yet he still fell victim to SIDS. This is one of the most frustrating things. One of the things that may have caused it is back in the

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