A new mom has bravely opened up about the night she went to bed next to her infant son and woke up to every parent’s worst nightmare.
Alissa Farrow from Portland, Oregon will never forget the day she welcomed her son Damon into the world. “He was born on April 28th at 9:21 p.m.,” Farrow told Newsweek. “My favorite memory was the day he was born. I just felt so much love that day and I loved the change of becoming a mother and finally meeting my son.”
Sadly, there’s another day in Damon’s life that Farrow will also never forget, as much as she might wish could. “On July 10 we put Damon down to go to sleep,” she said. “We co-slept with him and had told our doctor that we were co-sleeping so it was known.”
Farrow didn’t get much rest that night. “I remember not sleeping very well and I was constantly rolling over to check on him,” she said.
Though she did eventually fall asleep, Farrow was woken at around 6 a.m. on July 11 by her partner telling her that Damon “wasn’t breathing.” “I immediately told him to give him to me,” Farrow said. “He was limp and wasn’t breathing.”
What followed was a blur of desperate action to try to save their son. “I told him to call 911 and the operator talked me through CPR until the ambulance came,” Farrow said. “I rode in the ambulance to the hospital and they pronounced him dead.”
Farrow and her partner were in shock, and for the next few weeks wondered if there was anything they could have done.
In 2024, a study published in the journal Pediatrics, in which researchers analyzed nearly 7,600 U.S. Sudden Unexpected Infant Death (SUID) cases from 2011 to 2020, the CDC discovered almost 60 percent of these deaths occurred in shared sleep spaces.
However, a few weeks after Damon’s death, Farrow received a call from the medical examiner informing them that their son’s passing had been “unpreventable.”
“It was heartbreaking knowing that I couldn’t have prevented it and I felt like hearing that made it feel 10 times more real,” Farrow said. “In the beginning I was trying to pretend like it never happened and that his grandma was just babysitting for us, but hearing that made it just all feel so real.”
Thankfully, Farrow had a good support network.
“Being around my mom and talking with other moms that had gone through the same thing has helped,” she said. “My mom was a huge help because my younger sister was stillborn so she helped me with grieving. My son’s dad was also a huge part in helping me cope—I would wake him up in the middle of the night crying and he would hold me and tell me it was OK and it wasn’t my fault.”
Farrow also began sharing Damon’s story on social media, posting to TikTok under the handle @alissa_rxe. She said this has been a huge help.
“I found a lot of moms going through the same thing and a lot of moms that have recently gone through it,” she said. “I love talking to them and making them know that I see them and that they can talk to me. I’m a very big empath and I love helping people, so that’s a big part of why I post. I love keeping his memory alive.”
That’s not to say there hasn’t been the occasional callous remark among those commenting on the videos about what happened to Damon. Farrow tries to block those out. “Some people have very hurtful comments but I just delete them since they don’t know the full story and have no empathy,” she said.
Ultimately, Farrow hopes her videos will help others realize something like this “can happen to anyone.”
“I always thought it would never happen to me until it did,” she said. “I just wish I was more educated on SUIDs, I wish doctors would talk more about it before sending new parents home—not to scare them, but to educate them on it so they know ways to help prevent it.”
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