In an effort to stay true to what I want this blog to be I want to start with a very heavy topic.

Bentley Troy Boviall is my nephew that was born on December 1, 2016 approximately one month after my daughter was born. He was a very handsome little boy with the most beautiful blue eyes, born to my little sister, Kayla in the mountains of Montana.

I was not able to be at his birth because he was born three weeks early and I was only one month post-partum myself and recovering from a C-Section. My little sister and I had planned to meet up in my hometown in Kansas where our mom and older sister live in June 2017 and our kids were finally going to meet for the first time and I was finally going to get to snuggle my beautiful little nephew. 

On May 27, 2017, it was a Saturday night, I just got off work and my husband was grilling steaks for dinner. My little sister called me and I didn’t answer because we were about to eat and then she sent me a text that said, “it’s important” and at that moment I had no idea what I was about to hear. Before I even got the chance to call her back she called me again and she was crying and said “Bentleys dead” just like that, those two words, that’s it. I was in shock, I didn’t believe what she had just said. When I asked what happened she said that she had dropped Bentley off at his dads for the day and he called her hours later saying that he and Bentley were on the way to the hospital and he was pronounced dead upon arrival. 

We found out later that Bentley was murdered by his father 5 days shy of him turning 6 months old. This is something I will go more into detail about in a later blog post.

I always say Bentley Troy IS not WAS my nephew because it does not matter that he is gone, that does not make him my nephew in the past tense. Bentley is as much my nephew today as he was on May 26, 2017. Bentley will ALWAYS be my nephew and when I said goodbye to him at his funeral I promised him that I will always keep his memory alive, I will always do what I can to create awareness for child abuse. I will use Bentley’s life as an example, he could have been saved, and he could have lived, if only we knew.

With Love, BM