In the colorful craft room of her Provo home, Analane Powell takes apart wedding dresses and sews the pieces back together into something new. It’s to help families who lose babies.
Out of every thousand live births in Utah five infants die. That number doesn’t include stillbirths or miscarriages. For those families, the challenges that follow aren’t just emotional, but also logistical.
Powell’s wedding dress pieces help lighten the load by becoming burial clothing. They’re called angel gowns.
“It's very difficult to find the small sizes, like micro preemie sizes,” Powell said, “and so it is kind of a stressor for families to have to try to find that.”
![Powell has received several thank you cards from nurses. She said a couple of times when she’s donated, “the tears have come to the nurses eyes because they're so grateful to have [the angel gowns]. They appreciate having something to honor the babies with and to give to their families.”](https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/f630acd/2147483647/strip/true/crop/5700x3511+0+145/resize/880x542!/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fc7%2F49%2F535c10584e42afd1f49d22eb7a5b%2F20241030-ch-img-4001.jpg)
Powell does this because she had a brother who lived for three days, and her mother and sisters have had miscarriages. She’s donated her angel gowns to many parts of the U.S. and in four other countries.
There are similar programs, but Powell said a lot of hospital workers she’s met have never seen burial clothing like this before. So there’s a great need.
“Losing a child is one of the hardest things a person can go through,” she said. “I want them to know that they're not alone and that eventually, that they're going to find peace.”
Powell’s angel gown sizes go from 6 to 20 inches. For boys, they are little suits with a vest and small buttons. The dresses for girls are all unique because she uses the design of the wedding gown as inspiration.
She also makes a burial wrap that’s just a single square cloth. It tucks around the baby and ties in front.
“Angel pockets are for little babies that their skin is a little too tender and it would tear if they were to put an angel dress or an angel suit on them,” she explained.
As a labor of love, Powell does it for free, on her own time, outside of a full-time job. And all the wedding dresses come from donations.
One of the gowns waiting to take on a new life is adorned with beads, ruffles, sparkles and a long train. When Emily Ruiz of Syracuse first put it on 11 years ago, she felt like “everything was transformed.”
“Whoever made it, I felt like they just put so much love into it,” she said. “It carried magic in its threads somehow, and I felt like it needs to get out again.”
Ruiz hopes those threads will be healing for the families who wrap them around their lost child. Letting go was also healing for her. The dress came from her first marriage that ended in divorce.
Tears came to her eyes as she described giving it away.
“I think I was holding on to it because of my love for the dress and for some of the things tied to that.”
But Ruiz said “there's no better way to celebrate that chapter and what the dress symbolized, than to have it go towards a beautiful cause like this.”
And she hopes the families who receive pieces of her dress will be able to feel the love from her.
“I bet that they will,” Ruiz said as she choked up. “Maybe I’m part of that dress.”
Kristen and Zak Nowell of Santaquin felt that love when they received an angel gown created from a different dress. Their daughter Ayla died in September. Zak said it’s “extremely difficult” to dress a loved one for burial.
“That’s damn tough. But seeing her dressed the way that she was, it still holds a significant value to me,” he said. “It was just like, that's my child, that's my baby.”
Ayla had a rare genetic disorder. She lived three months. Her death was anticipated, but between buying a burial plot and casket, meeting with doctors, paying the bills and worrying about their two other young children, receiving one of Powell’s angel gowns lifted a burden.
“It was just an angel here on earth to help us find what we were needing at that time,” Kristen said.
And the dress wasn’t just about Ayla’s life.
“It's also that person that donated their wedding dress’s life,” she said. “It's Analane's life, and they're all stitched into this one dress.”
Powell calls this the angel gown effect.
“It's a circle, and we're just helping each other. And while our grief may be very different, together as a community, we're helping each other.”
She added, “I feel like that’s a pretty powerful thing.”
