A touching video of a 4-year-old boy singing to a memorial for his baby sister, who passed away last year, with a tune from the new Disney film “Coco” has been viewed by hundreds of thousands of people.
“He didn’t even know he was being recorded. He just wanted to sing to her for her 1st birthday,” the boy’s mother wrote in sharing the video on Twitter.
Her son, identified by the Washington Post as Alexander Vazquez, can be heard singing lyrics to the song “Remember Me” as he stands in front of a shrine to his late sister, Ava.
“Though I have to travel far, remember me. Don’t let it make you cry, Remember me,” he sings while strumming a toy guitar.
Alexander had seen the film twice in one week and, with the passing of his sister last May, found special meaning in the film, which explores Mexico’s Day of the Dead tradition, his mom, Stephanie Deais, told the Post.
On Dec. 30, what would have been Ava’s birthday, Deais overhead him singing the song with a guitar he had just gotten for Christmas in front of Ava’s photos.
“I was in my room and I heard him singing,” Deais told the Post. “I leaned over and saw he was playing for Ava, and I broke down and started crying.”
The infant passed away in May when she was just four months old due to a kidney condition that the San Antonio family did not expect would be fatal, according to the newspaper.
The tragedy was difficult for her older brother to understand, so his parents told him that although he can’t see her, she can hear him if he speaks to her.
Alexander has since included his later sister in his daily life, and Deais said the film “Coco” has also helped him process the loss.
Luckily for Alexander, he should have a new younger sister to bond with: Deais announced on Halloween that she is pregnant with a baby girl due in March.