Glen Korstrom
Northern News Services

INUVIK (Jan 15/99) - At about 8:30 a.m. on Dec. 17, parents Charlotte Moore and Jesse Turo woke to find the kind of nightmare all parents dread.

Their daughter, two-month-old Tashena Beverley Ann Moore Turo, was lying dead in her crib.

"That night we went to bed and in the morning I heard Jesse calling me and telling me that there was something wrong with the baby," 19-year-old Moore now recalls.

"He said that she was dead and I jumped up and I turned on the lights. I walked over to her and I turned her around and she was gone. It just crushed my heart as soon as I saw. I just held her and held her and held her."

At first neither knew what had happened. After an autopsy, they were called to the hospital where they learned doctors could not find anything wrong with Tashena. She had just stopped breathing, meaning she was a victim of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS).

SIDS is reported to affect about one in every 500 newborns in North America. There are no predictors, though some factors include poor prenatal care such as smoking, low birth weight, hard drugs and a young maternal age.

None of these factors need be present, however, and there is nothing parents can do to totally eliminate the risk.

Often the condition affects the second child, and it often occurs in winter.

"(She was) my first child. I saw her being born. She was stiff. I didn't think I'd ever see her like that but the story changes," Turo, the baby's 23-year-old father, says.

"I think that next time I'm a dad, I'll be a better dad."

Community offers support

Moore says many in the community have given them advice and support to "put the spirit back in our bodies."

And her own advice now to other parents is, "When your baby's sleeping, if he or she tends to sleep more than an hour or so, check to see if he or she is breathing."

But despite good intentions, SIDS could still hit and that practice may only result in exhausting the parents, according to an Internet site on the syndrome.

Some recommendations to reduce the risk of SIDS are to utilize early and medically-recommended prenatal care, avoid drugs, alcohol and smoking during pregnancy, not allow smoking near the baby, breast feed whenever possible and to avoid overdressing or overheating the baby.

Also, parents are advised to get immunizations on schedule and place the baby on a firm mattress and not a bean bag, cushions, waterbeds, soft fluffy blankets, comforters, stuffed toys or other soft materials.

"It's a lot different (since the death) because when you get used to having your baby around and then all of a sudden she's gone, you miss everything," Moore says.

"You miss making her bottles, changing her, bathing her, dressing her and every time you turn around you think she'll be there."

For Turo, who is originally from Fort Good Hope, the syndrome was something he feared because he says it happened to his parents twice despite the absence of medical evidence that it runs in families.

Though a funeral took place Christmas Eve at the RC Mission in Tsiigehtchic, where Moore grew up, she says, "We can still feel Tashena is with us."