During the last eight years Debi Faris-Cifelli buried 70 babies, singlehandedly wrapping each tiny body in a homemade quilt before placing it in a coffin that is no bigger than a shoe box. She named each infant before overseeing burial in a cemetery she calls the Garden of Angels.
This grim task was necessary because the 70 newborns died after being abandoned by their parents despite a California law that would have provided a way for others to take custody of their babies and care for them.
Faris-Cifelli carried out her work with a three-person staff and depended on donations, car washes and bake sales for funds to cover their annual budget of $172,000.
Then something miraculous happened–she won $27 million in the California State Lottery last week.
“Maybe it’s the children saying `thank you’ for taking care of them when nobody else would,” she said.
Most often Faris-Cifelli learns of a newly deceased infant by a call to her cell phone from the morgue. After she retrieves the body and prepares it, she takes it to the Garden of Angels and prays over the baby before placing the corpse in a fresh grave under a mulberry tree in the cemetery located in Calimesa, Calif. Each coffin is engraved with the name she has given the baby. And at the end of the ritual she releases dozens of doves.
Faris-Cifelli, 49, says she got the idea of arranging for their burials after seeing a local television news report about a newborn baby who had been stuffed into a duffel bag and tossed from a speeding car.
“I couldn’t move,” she says in a statement at her organization’s Web site. “I just kept thinking about this child and wondering how we could have become a society that just throws their babies away as if they were a piece of trash.”
She called authorities and asked that the baby’s body be released to her. While waiting for the body to be made available, she learned of two other abandoned, dead newborns. Her very first funeral buried all three.
After taxes, Faris-Cifelli and her husband Steve, a high school counselor, will receive $9 million. Some of the money will go to their seven children, but the bulk of it will be used to help bury abandoned newborns.
The couple won the lottery on only the third time they had bought a ticket.
They hope to fund scholarships named after some of the babies and to increase educational programs to make people aware of California’s three-year-old “Safe Arms for Newborns” law that gives parents three days to leave newborns at a safe location without fear of prosecution for abandonment. There is a two-week cooling-off period during which a parent can come forward and seek the return of a child.
Faris-Cifelli spearheaded the drive to pass the law. Illinois and 45 other states have similar laws.
