Ebbw Vale mum remembers "angel" daughter

Family will sing and blow out the candles on Sasha's cake - but the day will be touched with sadness for the 42-year-old because her first born won't be there with them in Ebbw Vale.

Sophie Williams, who loved to dance, died in a head on collision on the A465 Heads of the Valleys road near Tredegar last year on her way home to Waundeg after a Valentines Day meal with her fiance. She was eight and a half months pregnant with baby Kayleigh.

Mum-of-five Maria, herself pregnant at the time, thought her baby and Kayleigh would grow up like sisters, but instead she had the horror of having to arrange Sophie's funeral.

Speaking about the grief she has felt over the last year, Maria said: “I thought we could take our daughters to the park and on day trips together and now two of them are missing and nobody is going to fill that hole.”

She feared there might be further trauma ahead when, a few months after Sophie’s death, she went into labour after a car accident of her own.

“I was in Cwmbran going to Mothercare to buy some things for the baby and a car bashed into the back of me,” she said.

Feeling okay at first, she bought what she needed but went into contractions there and then and had to be rushed to hospital. Doctors were forced to perform a caesarian.

“I didn’t see my baby for 17 hours after I had her because she wasn’t breathing properly," she added I didn’t think she was going to survive,” she said. “It scared me after losing my daughter.”

Sasha, born in May last year, is now healthy and happy and has brought the family some joy when things seemed unbearable.

She loves watching Disney films, cuddling her siblings and playing her drum.

“I love Sasha to bits but she can’t replace my other daughter,” Maria said. “She’s another daughter in her own right.”

On that heartbreaking day last year, Maria’s eldest son phoned to say, ‘Mam, there’s been an accident’.

She said: “He told me it was a head on collision so I knew. I could just remember praying to god, ‘Please don’t take her away from me’ and ‘Let the baby be okay’. I wasn’t able to see her for hours.

“When they knew she was going they asked for me to go in and see her for five minutes. She was connected to so many tubes it didn’t look like her. She didn’t regain consciousness so I never got a chance to say goodbye to her at all.”

Baby Kayleigh died instantly after coming away from the placenta on impact.

“They brought her in while Sophie was in theatre”, Maria said.“As soon as they passed her to me at the hospital I knew she was Sophie’s child. She looked the absolute image of Sophie when she was a baby, with the tiniest little feet. We took pictures but I haven’t looked at them since. I can’t face it all.”

It has been more than a year since the accident but Maria said she thinks about Sophie every day and still tries to phone and text her.

Now Maria and her sons Shane and Skyle have commemorated Sophie by making her ashes into tattoos.

“I was going to put her ashes in a necklace but I couldn’t bear the thought of ever losing it,” Maria said. “Now we’ve got a bit of her with us every day. I don’t think you ever move on - I still feel as if she’s with me - but knowing her ashes are there does give me a bit of peace.”

She also wears a necklace engraved with Sophie’s picture, a gift from a friend after the terrible news.

“On DVD nights and family get-togethers I feel her loss the most,” Maria said. “She was always the first invited. We’ve all planned to go to Disneyland Paris in June because she really wanted to go.”

Her priority after that will be saving to buy an angel headstone for Sophie, to stand at the family plot in Cefn Golau. “One day we’re all going to be together again,” she said.

Trained in photography, Maria has hundreds of pictures of Sophie and keeps them in a memory box along with clippings from articles.

“I like people talking about her because I think it keeps her alive,” she said. “Everything is painful. She was my firstborn. She wasn’t just my daughter, she was my best friend.”