On the occasion of the fifth year anniversary of his daughter’s passing, Walker Hayes is commemorating his daughter.
On Wednesday, the 43-year-old singer of “You Broke Up with Me” posted a devastating picture on his Instagram account in memory of his late daughter Oakleigh. Oakleigh passed away in June 2018 when his wife Laney was giving birth to their son after suffering a uterine rupture during labor.
In the picture, the musician and his whole family are seen placing one foot on Oakleigh’s headstone, which is accompanied by a bunch of violet flowers that is placed in a brown vase.
Hayes just added the caption “” to the photograph.
Hayes and Laney have a total of six children between the ages of 7 and 17, including Oakleigh. Everly, Loxley, and Lela are the couple’s three girls, while Beckett, Baylor, and Chapel are their three boys. All six of the couple’s children are often featured on Walker’s Instagram account. The year 2004 marked the beginning of the couple’s marriage.
In 2018, Hayes spoke out in an exclusive interview with PEOPLE about the untimely passing of his daughter.
“‘What do I do?’ ” Hayes was able to recollect his thoughts from the moment. “When Laney awakes, how am I supposed to tell her? How am I supposed to be the one to break the news that it’s a girl but that she passed away? I was aware that saying anything like that would be detrimental to Laney.
“I just waited,” he recalled to PEOPLE when asked about those terrifying moments when he didn’t know if he would also lose Laney along with his newborn baby. “I just waited,” he said. Even though I had a feeling that today was going to be the worst day of my life, all I could really do was pray that it wouldn’t end up being.
Hayes and his family went on a mission trip for a total of twelve days in Rwanda during the month of April. “The trip,” Hayes said in an interview with PEOPLE, “was an answered prayer. Every day of the journey was the greatest day of my life, and it was the vacation of a lifetime.
The group of people traveled to houses that lacked power and plumbing, and during one of their stops, they assisted the homeowners in transporting water from a faraway well. Hayes was shocked to discover that his children didn’t seem to be affected by the lack of resources that they had.
“Their focus was on how cool their clothes were, how cool their songs were,” he recounted. “Their focus was on how cool their clothes were.” “How do they manage to keep those baskets balanced on their heads?'” They made friends in the same way that children do here in the United States, where they sort of gaze at one other for a few of minutes, and then before you knew it, they were off just playing. We walked down to the well, and when I turned around, Lolly, who was nine years old, was simply lost in a mob of youngsters chasing a frog.
When it came time to wrap up the trip, Hayes was moved to tears when his son, Beckett, who had been the most reticent and “camera-shy of the entire bunch,” said that the thing he would miss the most about Rwanda was “the dancing.”
Hayes said, “That completely demolished me.” “That was proof right there that the trip was an answered prayer — just dragging this cliché family out of our bubble,” she said. “That was proof right there that the trip was an answered prayer.” That was without a doubt one of the most breathtaking times.
