No one is supposed to wear black today.
Blair Michaela Shanahan Lane will be in a bright kelly-green, sleeveless dress with a pink, leather ribbon around her waist. Her fingernails will be painted pink. A pink bow will decorate her hair.
Inside her coffin, flip-flops, also pink.
“I want it to be a celebration,” said her mother, Michele Shanahan-DeMoss, of a young life cut short by a stray bullet earlier this week.
Blair, a gregarious 11-year-old with a big heart, died at Children’s Mercy Hospital on Wednesday. And, Shanahan-DeMoss said Friday afternoon, she knows that saying goodbye to her only child at the funeral today will be the hardest thing she’ll ever do.
“You have to understand, she was my whole entire being, my energy, my everything, like she was all I was ever going to do,” Shanahan-DeMoss said.
As she spoke, she toyed with the silver peace symbol on a bracelet around her wrist. Her daughter had given it to her last week.
On July 4, Blair, her mom and her dad, Brian DeMoss, were visiting with friends and other family members in Kansas City, just as they had done every Independence Day.
Blair was dancing in the lawn, happy about the sparkler that she had just lit. She danced every chance she got. Her mother said Blair was always dancing and singing in front of the bathroom mirror.
Suddenly, she collapsed. “She hit the ground so hard I heard it,” Shanahan-DeMoss recalled.
“When I turned her over, blood spewed from a small hole in her neck.” Her mother thought fireworks had struck the girl.
She later learned the cause of the wound. But no one knows the source of the bullet. Kansas City Police are investigating.
After the accident, Blair never spoke.
“She just looked at me as if to say, ‘Please do something,’ ” Shanahan-DeMoss said, her voice breaking.
But the bullet did too much damage. The swelling in her brain was beyond repair. Two days later, Blair was gone.
She left behind a scrap of paper that her mother later found in the girl’s bedroom. She had written out plans for a foundation that would raise money to buy socks for needy children.
Shanahan-DeMoss wasn’t surprised. Blair, a sixth-grader at Nativity of Mary School in Independence, was always journaling about projects she wanted to start.
“She was wise beyond her years,” said her aunt Heather Gordanier.
“She was definitely an old soul,” said Tina Taylor, a family friend. “There was just this sense of awareness about her that other children don’t have. She was still a child, but (it was) like she knew something.”
Blair knew about foster children, because her parents often cared for them at their home in Independence.
The foster children always came clutching a stuffed animal, but their feet were bare and dirty. It bothered Blair.
“She wanted to know why foster children always showed up with a teddy bear, but no one ever gave them socks.” Shanahan-DeMoss said.
Blair, who was always the first person on her street to greet new neighbors — sometimes chatting with them for hours — was a giver.
In third grade one day, she came home and bagged up a pair of her sneakers and took them to a girl in her class who had missed gym class because she didn’t have any. And about a year ago, Blair gave away her brand-new bicycle to a little girl from a poor family in the neighborhood.
“I’m going to keep her mission and her goals alive,” Shanahan-DeMoss said.
On Friday, she launched Blair’s Foster Socks, at www.blairsfostersocks.org, to honor her daughter. Contributions also can be made to The Blair Shanahan Lane Memorial Fund, Blue Ridge Bank & Trust, 6202 Raytown Trafficway, Raytown, MO., 64133.
Blair had planned to start the sock foundation as part of her Girl Scout Gold Award project.
“This will be her legacy,” her mother said.
It won’t be her only legacy, though. As an organ donor, she said, Blair also “is giving life to at least five people.”
Her lungs will go to a 13-year-old girl. One kidney will go to a 17-year-old boy, the other to a 66-year-old diabetic woman.
Her heart? It went to a boy, 14.
“At least she got to give her heart to a boy,” her mother said. “And I’m at peace. Because of her, hope lives on.”
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