PROVO — After releasing a touching song and hosting an event to comfort others that had experienced the loss of a child, a Provo singer lost her own baby one year later and found herself comforted by those she’d helped.

Sarah Bertola grew up in a musical family and released her own original album soon after graduating high school. She said she strives to create music to uplift and inspire others — a statement evidenced by the release of her song, “Until Heaven.”

After her sister lost a child in February 2015, Bertola felt inspired to write the song to comfort those who had experienced the death of a child or infant. In October 2015, she held a memorial event to give grieving parents an opportunity to celebrate the life of the children they’d lost prematurely and to find support among others with similar situations.

Photo credit: Daisy Tree Photography

After the release of her song, Bertola said she frequently had strangers reach out to her thanking her for her beautiful words and the comfort that her music had given them in their time of grief.

“I’ve had a lot of people contact me and ask if they can sing that song or play that song at funerals or support groups,” Bertola said. “And I’ve just been really glad to say like, ‘Yeah, use whatever you want.’

"It’s been really wonderful to be able to have some people contact me and say that that song has been really healing to them,” she added.

However, Bertola didn’t realize that her song would also one day end up comforting her. She gave birth to her first child on Aug. 11, 2016, right on her due date. She and her husband, Dallas Bertola, named their daughter, Alice, and Bertola said she was a great baby.

Photo credit: Natalie Mouritsen Photography

“Every mom probably says this if they lose their child, but she was the perfect baby,” she said. “She took to nursing right away and had no problems with it and she slept through the night since the time she was like 2 weeks old.

"She was so happy. She smiled at 2 weeks old," she added, "and was like recognizing people and doing huge smiles and laughing really early and just really, really alert. She had huge eyes and would just look at everything and soak in the whole world.”

Then when she had almost reached 5 months, Bertola went into Alice’s bedroom the morning of Jan. 5 and discovered that she had died sometime during the night. Bertola said her daughter was "stiff and pale" and that it was "pretty clear she'd been gone a little while."

“We are just still waiting to hear back from the medical examiner’s office," Bertola said. "They took her up there that day and did an autopsy. Hopefully, they’ll find something out so we can have some sort of answers. But we really don’t know. I just found her. It’s everyone’s worst nightmare and it totally happened.”

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The family held Alice’s funeral on Jan. 10 and she was buried in a Bountiful cemetery right next to her cousin, whose loss had initially inspired “Until Heaven.” They played Bertola’s song at the service and she said that the words that helped so many others have really comforted her.

“It’s been very interesting that it’s been able to help me heal as well,” she said. “I feel like a lot of the words are more appropriate than I even realized, and I’m like, ‘Yes, this is good. This is a good song’ and it’s been able to help me now. … I’ve just kind of felt like ‘Until Heaven’ was for Alice all along — I just didn’t know.”

Bertola said she was overwhelmed with a lot of support from the people she had met online and at her memorial event who had also lost children and heard her song. She said it was incredible to see such kindness and camaraderie emerge from such a tragic event and that she felt lucky to already have a support group of people who had experienced similar loss.

She started a blog about her experience and said she plans to make the memorial event an annual occurrence, likely to be held in October during “Child Loss Awareness Month.”

“I just want to re-emphasize how kind everyone has been,” Bertola said. “There was such an outpouring of love and support. And obviously, nothing can bring Alice back, but it has been so comforting to know that there are people just mourning with us and missing her who loved her, and it’s just been a really wonderful thing to come from such a horrible tragedy.”

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