(taken from the Des Moines Register's Thanksgiving story 2024)
How an Iowa girl’s cancer fight inspired her mom to start a toy line, and why it's growing
What if this hospital room wasn’t a hospital room?
What if it was a portal to another world. What if instead of steel, the instruments were stone and covered in moss, all their sharp edges dulled by a thick coat of greenery. And what if the cabinets were tree hollows and the drawers knolls, perfect niches for nests and little critter hidey holes.
What if the beeping and the suctioning and all the harsh din of modern medicine — the equipment keeping Niavh Hyatt alive — what if their bluster faded behind the muffled hum of nature. The rush of a creek. The rustles and cracks of the forest floor under padded feet. The hoot of a far-off owl. The call of a bird.
What if the dust dancing in the sunlight’s beams while your daughter is in hospice isn’t that at all. What if it’s the mist descending over this wooded paradise. The mist that hangs when the rain has finally ended. When all the creatures start to emerge again. Life refreshed and renewed.
This was the game Heather Hyatt played with her daughter Niavh when cancer got too heavy. When they were prisoners to another hospital room for another treatment. Another infusion. Another surgery.
They built this world together. Whether Niavh was drawing her version of their woodland inhabitants — somehow always surrounded by a sky full of rainbows — on scraps of paper, or Hyatt was sculpting her own takes on the critters that lived in their paradise, mother and daughter were there together.
That world and this world simultaneously.
They built other universes, too. Domains influenced by their favorite Studio Ghibli movies, fantastical Japanese anime that infuse animals and objects with unique spiritual essences. Or created identities, whole lives, for their favorite art toys, a catchall term for collectable, pop art figurines made by small-batch artisans — an artistic genre that became “their thing” after stumbling on them while waiting for scan results one day.
In the toughest stretches, being able to retreat to these worlds sustained the pair emotionally, spiritually and in some ways physically, a boost of energy and happiness that just kept them going.
For the Hyatts, when science was at the end of itself, when nothing was working and answers eluded, imagination was all that was left. Art was all that was left.
“Everything that she went through and was still going through at that time was just super heavy, and art was a way to get into another realm,” Hyatt says.
“Where cancer wasn't there, and there was no hospital, and there wasn’t just all the stuff she had to endure to stay alive. This art was another place where we could be, where there was color and things were happy. It was a way to, I guess, disconnect.”
But what she didn’t know as she sat spinning tales with her daughter was how their fantasy would crash into her reality. How she’d be able to dip back into their woodland paradise to feel closer to her daughter long after the needles were put away and the machines stopped with their incessant alerts.
Or how she’d harness that world to keep her daughter’s memory alive through Owlberry Lane, her own line of specialty art toys — a line that is on the brink of exciting, possibly explosive, growth.
No, back then, during the six years of Niavh's cancer battle, they just built. And built. And built. As days merged into weeks and weeks into months and months into years, Hyatt kept turning to her daughter, buoying her through imagination: This hospital room — this particular one — this is not a hospital room.
It’s a portal to another world.
‘The most light-filled child’: Imagination offers safe haven
Niavh had a headache, the nurse said, one bad enough that Hyatt needed to come get her from school.
Hyatt got migraines as a kid, too. That pounding runs in her genes, she thought. And this was just days after Thanksgiving in 2011 — lots of activity, lots of excitement, especially for a 7-year-old.
She figured Niavh’s pain would go away with some more sleep. A hearty meal. A day resting, maybe two, she’d snap right back.
I feel floaty, mom, Niavh said as Hyatt drove her home that day. I feel really floaty.
But the headache lingered. The pounding increasing. And now Niavh was having trouble seeing out of one eye. Like the edges of her vision were blurred.
A scan revealed masses on Niavh’s brain, and the pressure they were exerting inside her skull was dangerous. Within hours of stepping into the hospital, they were on a helicopter to the Mayo Clinic.
Hyatt’s daughter had a headache on Monday.
Before dinner on Wednesday she had a rare brain and spine cancer that would take her quickly. That’s what medical journals said.
But Niavh’s spirit seemed uncrushable, like even something as bold and radioactive as CANCER didn’t stand a chance against her verve. In Old Irish, her name — pronounced Neee-Vah — means bright, radiant even, and to those who knew her, Niavh was the embodiment of both.
“Niavh was honestly one of a kind. She was just such a special girl,” says Lucy Sandeen, whose daughter Elayna was also diagnosed with childhood cancer and became fast friends with Niavh. “I always describe her as just being the most light-filled child I had ever met.”
“She just made everything glow around her.”
Her smile had a way of taking up her whole face, and her laughter dared those around to try to keep from giggling, says Michael Burton, her fourth-grade teacher at Western Hills Elementary. They played practical jokes on each other, and she especially loved to “surprise” him by pulling off her stocking cap and sneaking it onto his head.
He knew it was coming, of course, but he’d feign shock.
“From the moment I met her, I could tell that we were going to have fun,” he says. “I could tell that with Niavh’s wit and the way that she went about things, that she was just going to be a blast to have in the classroom.”
Where Niavh was outgoing and vivacious, the first to take up the space of a room, her mother has always been a little quieter, more reserved.
Growing up on the edge of West Liberty, Hyatt passed her days in the wooded area behind her parents’ house. Out amongst the flowers — which her mother planted all across their property, wayward violets even peeking up through grass randomly over their sprawl — Heather could pretend to be a bunny or some other critter living amongst the trees.
She was supremely content to be outside and “in my little imagination world.” And when she wasn’t amongst the blooms, she supplemented them with fantastic tales: “The Never-Ending Story” or “E.T.”
And she drew. She’d find scraps of paper and draw the animals who lived in her backyard. On the church bulletin while hunkered in the pews. On the back of homework. A receipt. Margins.
“My brain just needs to get these ideas I have out,” she’d write later, describing her pull to create.
She was fascinated by the natural world, especially birds. All the different colors and lines. The beauty that exists in form and function.
However different in temperament they were, that love of imagination and innate creativity connected Niavh and Heather, who studied art in college and worked as a graphic designer before the diagnosis.
Niavh was a “born artist,” says Dawn Thompson, whose son Brady was Niavh’s best friend since kindergarten. “Her imagination just would go on and on and on.”
“She could turn anything into this magical other world, like a magical place that you wanted to be.”
Her drawings, even her back-of-the-napkin doodles, were vibrant — like a kaleidoscope on paper — with rainbows and colorful pink and red and orange skies that filled every square inch. And just like that kaleidoscope, a turn of the page summoned a brand-new pattern, new colors, just as vibrant as the ones that come before.
The characters in Niavh’s drawings were always an amalgamation of her own design: a cat-dragon or a cat-snail or an insect with feathers or an owl with a snout or a cat with a ladybug’s spots (admittedly there were lots of cats). And, inevitably, these critters had a home and a community and, somehow, an entire life in that 8½-by-11 rectangle.
There were depth and scope — even when she was just doodling.
“Every creature, even if it was just a temporary thing, a blob of Play-Doh or whatever, would have a distinct, ‘This is what they are.’ They had their own unique personalities,” Hyatt says.
They have a place in this world. Niavh would say. They were here.
How tragedy birthed the first Owlberry
Niavh always knew what was coming, even if she didn’t understand totally. But then, not even adults can face with totality “the end.”
Even at 7, she didn’t sugarcoat. She, herself, told her friend Brady that she had cancer — and that she’d got to fly on a helicopter. As the disease progressed, she’d write about her feelings and her pain, little cat-snails in the margins, in a traveling journal they traded between each other.
But Niavh also hid all that tumult. With Elayna, Sandeen’s daughter, who was a few years younger, Niavh could soothe and comfort and just let her be a kid. So many others were standoffish or saccharinely tender — and Elayna just wanted to be normal. For one second.
“She put on a brave face for people when she didn't have to,” says Thompson, Brady’s mother. “When you would come to visit, she would smile, but you knew inside she was going through something that nobody should ever have to go through.”
In the beginning of Niavh’s cancer, art felt superfluous, luxurious almost. The fear and anxiety stymied creativity. As a mother, Hyatt had to focus on her daughter’s health — she could never forgive herself if something was lost in the second she looked away from the big hairy problem at the center of their lives.
But in the quiet of the hospital room, art seemed to be what mother and daughter always came back to. Years before cancer changed their lives, Heather bought a purse that came with a little keychain figurine, an anthropomorphic cat. They both liked its playfulness. Its whimsy reminded them of their favorite Studio Ghibli movies.
That figurine led them to look up others. And others begat others. And soon they were deep in the art toy world and its legions of online fans.
They bought some of their favorites, and the boxes would pile up in their West Des Moines living room, giving them something to look forward to when they got home from their quarterly treks up north to Mayo.
They’d talk about their favorites like critics: what they liked and what they’d change. And they’d invent stories, little lives for these guys. This became as routine as the tests and scans and the pokes and the prods. Another doctor. More art.
In the face of despair, imagination, the unbelievable, was not only credible. It was essential.
Especially when the finality of Niavh’s young life was determined. The cancer had spread. Terminal. She was 10.
Niavh would go to school when she could, but many days her stamina waned quickly. So instead Hyatt and Niavh would pass hours doing art together. First in the basement and then in the sunroom Keith Hyatt built so they could both enjoy the early morning brightness. They’d watch the dust dance in its beams.
There was a peculiarity to those days. The knowledge that her child was going to die, the complete lack of hope of existing in that space, would give way, on occasion, to beautiful moments.
So many of those happened in that sunroom as the disease ate up her baby. Niavh had her own desk with colored pencils — specific brand and specific colors. And Hyatt had a card table nearby.
For a while, Hyatt created jewelry, selling on Etsy. But all the hours spent investigating art toys, inventing their creatures, got Hyatt thinking about her own. Her brain had these ideas she just needed to get out.
So she sculpted. A short, squat bluebird-like critter with cat ears and big, glassy, owl-ish eyes.
“Niavh really, really liked it,” Hyatt remembers. “And she said, ‘Oh, it looks like a little blueberry,’ and then so that was always kind of in my mind.”
It’s an Owlberry, she thought. The first Owlberry.
‘My art smiles, because in some ways I can’t’
Hyatt holds a lot of darkness inside, remnants of the battles she endured taking care of a child who faded slowly, sleeping more and more until she one day just didn’t wake up. Now her spirit dances on rainbows, Hyatt wrote in her daughter’s obituary, free from pain.
The cancer was supposed to take her quickly. But Niavh fought for six years, nearly half of that spent in hospice. Her verve and spirit put up as much resistance as possible until her death at age 14.
For Hyatt, that inner darkness manifests as guilt most often, sadness, too: Is she being a good mom to her other child? Did she do enough? Is she enough? Can she ever be enough?
Sculpting kept the darkness at bay when her daughter was dying. It still does.
And no matter how ferocious all that muck seems — and sometimes she’s sure the darkness could swallow her up — the creatures are always joyful in the end. Bright. Silly. Happy.
As if somewhere between her head and her hands, the light prevails.
My art smiles, because in some ways I can't, she wrote recently.
The name Owlberry Lane didn’t come to Hyatt until after Niavh died. But the visual motif, the spirit of the work — a line of woodland creatures festooned with natural vines or leaves — is rooted in the worlds they created amidst cold stainless steel and incessant beeps.
And there’s a mythology, too, a backstory just like Niavh would have written: That centuries before, there were people there, on Owlberry Lane, but they’re gone now, and earth has grown over the bricks and structures left behind. Nature’s reclaimed it. The creatures roam free.
Recently, she’s been approached to do something larger with her Koroqi character, a tree spirit, possibly work on a production-ready version of the piece. Details are still being worked out, but for those in the toy world, this would represent a new high-water mark.
“Her artwork just amazes me,” Thompson says. “When I look at it, you can see Niavh in that artwork. If you knew Niavh, those colors that she uses and the eyes of the characters, Niavh is coming through there.”
Thompson's son Brady graduated in 2022 with what would have been Niavh’s class. His entire life, he’s worried Niavh would be forgotten, his mom says, so at his graduation party, he made a memory board for his friend. Set it up right next to his.
That day, the Hyatts gifted him the journal in which he and Niavh shared secrets and inside jokes and stories. She would have wanted you to have this.
“The scariest thing is to think your child could ever be forgotten,” says Sandeen, whose daughter Elayna died less than a year after Niavh.
“Our kids continue to be vital parts of our everyday life in whatever shape that takes,” she says. Hyatt and Niavh "created that art together, and that's a way for her to keep Niavh’s memory alive, both in her own heart and for other people, to remind them that she was here and how super, super special she was.”
Hyatt still works in the sunroom. Niavh’s colored pencils still sit on the windowsill behind her, part memorial, part good luck charm. Her art still adorns the walls, and its kaleidoscope colors still inspire Hyatt.
Her spirit is alive in the work — a spirit that spreads as Owlberry Lane grows.
And she’s there in the worlds they built. When the dust dancing in the sunlight’s beams reminds of the mist over their woodland paradise, the sort that hangs when all the creatures start to emerge again.
Learn more about Hyatt's work at OwlberryLane.com and follow her on Instagram @OwlberryLane.
Courtney Crowder, the Register's Iowa Columnist, traverses the state's 99 counties telling Iowans' stories. Her grandmother, who recently turned 90, is a breast cancer survivor. Reach her at [email protected] or 515-284-8360.