‘I’m Desperate’: Iowa Family Loses Late Son’s Ashes On FL Vacation

FLORIDA — An Iowa family is desperate after losing a stuffed elephant named Bruce that belonged to their late son, Gabryel, and contains a small bag of his ashes during a Florida vacation.

“I feel sick, struggling to sleep. I’m desperate,” the boy’s mother, Liz Atkinson, wrote in a Facebook post. “I need him back.”

The post, written Saturday morning, has received hundreds of “likes” and comments and has been shared more than 7,600 times as of Monday morning.

Gabryel was given the elephant while he was in NICU. During his short life, he underwent more than 50 surgeries and procedures, and for each one, Bruce was by his side.

“He slept with it every night and since his passing, my husband and I have had it in our bed with us,” Atkinson wrote.

Diagnosed with a rare chromosome 9 abnormality while his mother was pregnant, Gabryel died last year on April 9 when he was just 7 years old, according to his obituary shared by Lunning Funeral Chapel.

The boy died before his family could visit Walt Disney World. So, to celebrate what would have been his eighth birthday, his parents decided to make the trip this year with their surviving son, Sebastyan. And they made sure Bruce — with Gabryel’s ashes in his pouch — came with them.

They traveled to Central Florida last month, visiting three different cities. The family first stayed at the Beachside Resort in Cocoa Beach from April 22-24.

“Bruce came on the boat parasailing with us (on April 24) … and Sebastyan held him on the boat,” Atkinson wrote. “This is where the trip gets hazy in my memory due to emotions and grief. Thinking back, I don’t recall Sebastyan bringing him back to our vehicle.”

The vacation, generally, was difficult for the family, who was mourning Gabryel barely a year after his death.

“The trip was a bit hectic with (three) different cities and hotels and grief brain kicked in at some point with all of the emotions, making me really struggle with simple memory tasks,” his mother wrote.

After Cocoa Beach, they drove to Disney Springs on April 24. They spent a few hours there before checking in to the Palazzo Lakeside Hotel in Kissimmee, where they stayed through the next day. Atkinson doesn’t recall bringing Bruce from their car into that hotel room.

They checked in to the Art of Animation Resort at Disney on April 25 and stayed there until April 30. When they checked out, “Bruce wasn’t anywhere to be found,” she wrote.

Still, she was hopeful they might find the cherished stuffed elephant once they returned home.

“Because vehicles get messy on trips, I kept thinking maybe he was just mixed in somewhere (very unlike me, I know where everything is 100 percent of the time even on trips, thank you grief) but once we got home May 1, I searched everywhere. Every bag. He’s gone,” Atkinson wrote.

She believes Bruce could be in the parking lot near Cocoa Beach Parasail, the Palazzo or the orange parking ramp at Disney Springs.

“I know people think I’m stupid for bringing him, but he’s been on every trip since having my son. He’s never been lost. I always keep very good track of him. Just with the chaos of multiple hotels and so many bags in the car and little sleep, I can’t remember,” she told Patch. “That’s crazy to people but I’m struggling to think back through all 12 days. I know I did my sweep through of each hotel after packing up bags and didn’t feel I missed anything, and each business listed has checked their lost and found to no avail.”

Atkinson asks anyone who might have seen Bruce in Central Florida to private message her on Facebook.