Funeral and Burial Expenses for Brooklynn

Hi, my name is Ashley Embry and I’m creating this fund raiser in an effort to reduce the stress of mounting burial costs for the unexpected loss of Chris and Aprils baby girl Brooklynn Dawn Johnston. Attached you will find the original post made by April Wilson. If you can donate, anything helps, if you can’t please help by sharing and praying for strength and healing for April and Chris.

On August 7, 2022 at 7:26pm, our beautiful baby girl Brooklynn Dawn Johnston was brought silently into this world. She was so perfect, born at 5lbs 5oz & 17.25” long, taken by emergency c-section at 33 weeks and 2 days old.

I didn’t feel Brooklynn move that day and didn’t realize it until about 2:30pm, once I had gotten home from work. As soon as I got home I told Chris that she had been so chill and must had been sleeping good after being up all night kicking me. I sat on the couch with Chris for a few minutes and then just started to cry and immediately got an overwhelming feeling that something was wrong. I did everything I knew possible to get her to just move or kick me just one time. Nothing worked and I knew it was time to go to the hospital to get checked out. We we arrived the nurses were able to get her heart beat on a NST machine but had trouble keeping it. The doctor decided to do an ultrasound and while she did it, we heard a heart beat but there was no movement from her. My OB doctor quickly came down and also had trouble finding a heart beat again and he decided that we needed to rush into the OR for an emergency c-section. Within minutes Brooklynn was taken out of me and our worst nightmare became reality. We didn’t hear our baby cry. I laid on the OR table with Chris next to me holding my hand and we cried while hearing the NICU team coding and working on Brooklynn to get life back into her. But nothing worked. Our baby girl was gone and not coming back. We lost our daughter. I truly do not understand why God would put us through a pain like this. Losing my mom as a teenager was so hard, but losing my daughter is a pain I’ve never felt. Our baby girl did not deserve to die.

Carrying my baby girl for 33 weeks and 2 days was the most joyful and happiest time of my life. I was so excited to meet her and become a mom. She had shown me my whole pregnancy how funny and playful she was. I will never forget her kicks and punches she gave me every day. She was the most active baby I had ever heard of someone having. We played kicking games together, I would push on my stomach and she would kick that exact spot over and over again. She would get so excited and would kick like crazy when I would sing to her in the car and she loved hearing Chris’s and Caylee’s voices. Her favorite part of the day was definitely when I would either eat cereal or lay down for bed. She would literally kick me all night long, usually only letting me get just a few hours of sleep every night. Brooklynn really was my entire world. Everything I did revolved around her and not just because I was pregnant, but because she was all that I could ever think about. I had never felt so much love before. I loved her more than anything in this world and it was a type of love that I had never experienced. I was becoming a mother and it was the best time of my life.

After the doctor delivered her and realized she was stillborn, they were in shock and had no explanation on what happened to her. They thought for sure she was going to be okay, we just had to get her out of me to work directly on her. They cried with us after telling us they would not stop working until they figured out what went wrong. After a couple days of testing and multiple doctors looking for anything possible that could’ve caused this, they were able to conclude that her cause of death was a spontaneous fetal maternal hemorrhage. My baby girl hemorrhaged 75% of her blood into my body through the umbilical cord and placenta. There was not any trauma that caused the hemorrhage and we will likely never know exact why this happened.

Chris and I are not doing well right now and just can’t wrap our minds around the fact that she is gone. We are asking everyone to please give us space and time to grieve.

We will be having a service and burial to lay our baby girl to rest. Her funeral will be held at Owen Funeral Home on Dixie Hwy at 11:00am on Tuesday, August 16th, 2022, the service will be at 1:00pm and she will be buried at Bethany Memorial Cemetery following the service.

Brooklynn Dawn Johnston, mommy and daddy loves you so very much. You helped me to experience love in a way I could’ve never imagined. I’m going to miss you so much baby girl. You might not be here with us physically but I know you will always be in our hearts and a piece of you will always be with me. You are the most beautiful girl I’ve ever laid eyes on. My true belief is you were just too beautiful for earth. Mommy, daddy, and Caylee love you so much.