Amazing Story of Mum Who Fosters Dying Children

This is the heart-wrenching story of a mother who gives love to terminally ill children when everyone else has given up on them.

Mum-of-eight, Cori Salchert, from a small town in Wisconsin in the US, has opened her home to care for children who are dying because she doesn’t want them to die alone and without love.

Cori and her husband Mark have eight biological children, but have fostered additional hospice children from families who find it difficult to deal with their child’s suffering. It’s known as the “House of Hope”, however, tragically, the children who have come to live there, are also meant to die young.

Now, they are treating and caring for two-year-old Charlie who is suffering from a neurological impairment.

“He will die, there’s no changing that.

“But we can make a difference in how he lives and the difference for Charlie is that he will be loved before he dies,” Cori tells the Sheboygan Press.

Cori said that she thought of opening her home to sick children when her younger sister, Amie, went to live in a children’s home for impaired children after she contracted spinal meningitis as an infant which left her mentally and physically handicapped. However, when Amie was 11, she wandered out of an unlocked door at this home and drowned in a pond. This inspired Cori into bereavement care.

Cori founded and worked for Hope After Loss Organisation (HALO), as a perinatal bereavement nurse, helping families coping with loss during pregnancy or the death of a newborn. This opened her eyes to what she called, “hospice babies” or young children with terminal illnesses, left by their parents because of the difficult situation, though Cori never judged the parents, but said she just wanted to take these dying children home with her.

She also set up a Facebook page, SafeHaven4Babies, where she posts updates of the children their family takes care of.

In August 2012, the Salchert family took in a nameless two-week-old baby, through the Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin’s treatment foster care program. The baby, who they named Emmalynn, was in a vegetative state because the left and right hemispheres of her brain were missing.

“She could have died in the hospital, wrapped in a blanket and set to the side because she was being sustained with a feeding pump. But we brought this beautiful baby home to live, and live she did.

“Emmalynn lived more in 50 days than a number of folks do in a lifetime. We held her constantly and took her everywhere with us,”  Cori explains in a post for TODAY.

Cori said the baby passed away silently at night at the kitchen table tucked warmly in Cori’s night robe after all of the family got to hold her and kiss her goodnight.

In October of 2014, the Salchert family took in four-month-old Charlie who has Hypoxic Ischemic Brain Encephalopathy — a condition where the baby experiences neurological impairments as a result of a lack of oxygen and is completely dependent on a ventilator and tube feeding.

Although Charlie’s condition is not necessarily considered terminal, but children with this type of brain damage typically die by two years of age. However, Charlie, who has been adopted by the family, has just celebrated his second birthday last June.

Cori says they treat each day as a gift, taking Charlie on outings and giving him as many experiences as they can during his remaining time.

The family get strong support from their community and church in raising Charlie and other previous foster children.

Cori says these children need nurses, but they also need mums. “We invest deeply, and we ache terribly when these kids die, but our hearts are like stained-glass windows…Those windows are made of broken glass which has been forged back together, and those windows are even stronger and more beautiful for having been broken,” she said.

Source: Kidspot.com.au