Exclusive: A Father Speaks About the Loss of His Little Boy

Exclusive: A Father Speaks About the Loss of His Little Boy

(Hear the whole interview by clicking on the player above.)

SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH – April 10, 2015 (Gephardt Daily) – When Tallin “Tui” Harding came into this world, he spent two months in the hospital because he was an extreme preemie, and he went back several times in the last couple of years. “To know that I wasn’t even able to hold him for the first 30 days of his life, I look at every single day, I was blessed to have him around, and to hole that up and put it away, would be an absolute waste, of the two years that we had” said Kaj Harding, Tui’s dad.

On March 28, Nikki and Kaj’s five children were playing in front of their home in Lehi when Nikki was on her way to Women’s Conference.

As she was pulling out of their cul-de-sac, Tui darted into the path of the car and was  killed.

Yesterday would have been Tui’s third birthday. And today, with the news that another little girl was killed when a vehicle driven by a family member ran over her, Kaj gave an exclusive interview to Gephardt Daily.

“I would say cherish every thought, every video, every minute, and if you have those, put them somewhere where you can save them, archive them, have them readily available, have a back-up, so you never loose them, make sure you’ve got those experiences in front of you, because the days will come that are going to be insanely hard, and I know it, I’m almost waiting for them, anticipating I guess are better words,” Kaj said.

But on Tui’s birthday the family managed to celebrate. “Tui’s birthday was fun,” Kaj said. “We sang songs, we sang Happy Birthday and we sent up a cupcake, tied to a balloon, that the kids all thought was just hilarious, they attached notes and they were sending them to heaven tied to a balloon string. They wrote notes or they did their best to color a picture; some of them are quite young.

“Yesterday we had half-dozen to a dozen people showing up absolutely randomly, teddy bears, cookies, plates, balloons, gift cards, coming in, just all day. We had two dozen or so pinwheels just at our house and then when we went to his graveside, there were balloons, there was pinwheels, cookies.”

He said the family has witnessed an enormous outpouring of love. “The support is huge, it’s overwhelming,” he said. “The donation site’s been shared over 4,000 times last time I saw, we’ve had literally dozens of different countries that have posted or reached out to us. We’ve had non-affiliated religions; we are LDS, people texting us from different states, saying my Pastor shared your story at my sermon. We’ve had people calling us saying because of everything I’ve seen, I want to go back to Church. It’s overwhelming, knowing that reach is tens of hundreds of thousands of people have heard, and we have too many people to respond back to, it’s humbling to say the least. I compartmentalize things really easy, and it’s easy for me to box my emotions in certain piles, to come back to later, where my family members, they’re a lot more emotional, they’re a lot more surface level, I see my wife and she’s struggling to maintain composure a lot of the time, where I’m a bit more stiff in that sense, it literally has been a phenomenal blessing that I can’t even quantify.

“The biggest thing I want everyone to hear, is thank you, many of these notes and drop-offs don’t even have return names or addresses, and it’s just making sure that everybody knows very much thank you for everything that they’ve done and the blessings, the love that we’ve felt and frankly the humility that we’ve felt, we’ve been overwhelmed with kindness and just remembering that anybody out there that has the good heart that is open and willing, those opportunities come back ten-fold and we are in a great debt, to society in general, family, friends, neighbors, everybody, we’ve kind of made a little vow for ourselves to do what we can and I would encourage everybody to do what they can.”

He said at this point, it is the simple things that are turning out to be a challenge. “We were doing laundry and of course it was a bit sensitive folding clothes and putting them away, the simplest things are starting to take the biggest toll at this point,” he said. “It’s been a hit-and-miss rough deal for obviously the last couple of weeks. It’s good overall, we’re managing well, but we have our moments.

“Nikki has her moments when she’ll close a couple of doors, sit in the bathroom, and sob. Admittedly I do that probably two or three times a day at this point, where it’s just that quiet… we need peace, just separate ourselves, and the rest of the time we want people around, we want to be distracted, we don’t want to forget and obviously it’s an extremely important part of our life but we want to be distracted from it.

He said their children are doing surprisingly well. “From what I understand, they all kinda saw everything, the three youngest ones, they didn’t really understand, they just thought, well, Tui’s hurt, they got skirted off into the house, the older one, he initially had it a little bit rougher but he’s at a point too where he’s in a better place, he’s kind of getting his mind wrapped around that. Initially it was challenging because images would flash in their minds and it flashes in mine too but it’s getting less and less as to where they are remembering everything else we’ve done differently.

He said the main way he would characterize their son was as a happy little boy. “He’d pound on the door, just to wake us up, not because he was scared, he’d turn on the light and play with his trains at three in the morning,” Kaj said. “He was just a happy kid all around. He was always, always, constantly just laughing, and that’s the one thing I remember, very rarely sad or upset. That’s why we did the banners that we did, “Live and Laugh Like Tui,” because he was just constantly laughing, just random stuff, would set him in a laughing frenzy, for half-an-hour.”

He said the family are finding different ways to remember Tui. “We have a mass of probably 30 or 40 pictures, we’ve got holidays, birthdays, we’ve made video montages of his pictures, and just him and everything that’s going on so there’s a lot we’re doing to just remember and capture what we have,” he said. “When we were doing our family viewing, each of the kids put something in there, he has a walkie-talkie, they have a set for every one of the kids, so they just walk around the house talking to Tui in heaven all the time. I put a shoe in Tui’s casket, put the left one in there, and I’ll keep the one on the right so we can remember to choose the right and follow the right rules that we believe in, so we can get back to Tui and be with him, so we carry that”

And he said the family accepts that there is nothing they could have done to prevent the tragedy. “When you’re walking and he’s right behind you, next thing you hear is she’s getting ready to take off and there goes a pair of wheels and it’s that quick,” he said. “The sheer reality was, we were aware, and that split second….there literally was nothing to do. Anything people can do to post those little neon crossing guys that say ‘Kids Playing’, just little things they can do. I don’t think there’s anything in this case we could have done.

“Everybody’s a bit different and I don’t think the healing’s ever going to fully occur, I think it’s going to be more managing symptoms than fixing, somebody quite literally yesterday, they had an incident eight years ago where their child passed and they said we still think about it every single day, and it hurts, and many times a week I’ll just sit there and cry for no reason, and there’s other times I’ll be elated and excited,” he said. “Here we are less than two weeks in and I know there’s going to be a day when it’s just going to hit me, and I’m going to be an absolute mess, and there’s going to be other days I’m nothing but excited, that he’s in a good place. Everybody’s different, I like to steal away and grieve in my own way, be private about it then there’s other times when I’m reaching out to people and actively saying, want to come over and just talk to us, anything, I would say don’t be shy of having pictures, don’t be shy of having memories, don’t be shy of sharing the good, because if we only remember the negative images, that’s the worst thing we can do, ‘cos all we’re going to see it the detriment, rather than the benefit, of having that experience.”