THE heavens appeared to weep yesterday as four-year-old Abigail ‘Abby’ Lee and five-year-old Antoinette ‘Pinky’ Cranston, who died as a result of a fire at the SOS Children’s Village in Stony Hill St Andrew last month, were laid to rest.

But the bleak Wednesday morning sky, that gave way to intermittent showers, was nothing compared to the tears that flowed inside the Emmanuel Baptist Church in Kingston where scores of children and adults gathered to say their final farewells to Pinky and Abby

In a solemn and partially tailored rendition of Let’s Meet by the River, the girls’ mates from SOS sang, ‘And after I find you let’s go see Jesus/Then let’s go find ‘Pinky’ and ‘Abby’ [our Dad and our Mother] /Let’s meet by the river over on that beautiful shore’.

Several tributes followed, including one from the aunts and housemothers at the SOS village, which was punctuated with sorrowful outbursts. For, even as they sang The Grace Thrillers’ Oh, What a Sunrise …that Death will lose its sting and the grave its victory, the deaths of Pinky and Abby were still clearly on the their minds.

After they had finished singing and a trio from the group attempted a spoken tribute, most of them, as well as some members of the congregation, started crying.

The girls’ teacher from the Hermann Gmeiner Kindergarten school, who did a remembrance, said Pinky was willing to attempt all activities, while Abby was called the water baby because she would stay in the bathroom with the pipes on and “would be having great fun”. She said because of her affection for water, Abby was given the chore to water plants, but she over-watered them all.

Village director at SOS Gerand Taylor, who gave the eulogies, said five-year-old Pinky, who had been at the village a mere six months at the time of her death, gained her nickname from a pair of pink shoes she loved to wear. Abby, meanwhile, had been at the home since March, 2004. Both girls were born in Kingston.

After the service, a teary-eyed Camora Allen, Abby’s biological mother, said she had been planning to visit her daughter over the Christmas holidays, when she heard of her death.

Meanwhile, in separate messages, Kingston Mayor Desmond McKenzie and Health Minister Horace Dalley expressed concern at the number of children across the island who are being killed as a result of fires or violence.

“It would be good for us to know if the rights of our children were violated in any way,” McKenzie said, regarding the results of investigations into the December 17 fire, which took the girls’ lives. Earlier, head of the Child Development Agency (CDA) Allison Anderson, during her tribute, said CDA investigators had received the fire report, which should add some speed to the probe.

Dalley also reminded parents and guardians that under the Child Care and Protection Act of 2004, it is possible for them to be charged with negligence, if they are found to have brought harm to any child.

The tribute brought by Barrett Town SOS bore a statement that received open agreement from the congregation: “A heart broken by the death of a child can never be healed.”