Freedman - Never Forgotten: Stories of love. loss, and healing after misscarriage, stillbirth, and neonatal death

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

A word from Rebecca Sparrow:

Are some friendships fated? I truly believe so, because thats how I feel about my friendship with Mia Freedman.

Four years ago Mia and I were strangers. But when mutual friends told Mia that my daughter Georgie had been stillborn, she reached out to me immediately, took me by the hand and has walked me through the grief I have felt over the past three years. Quite simply, I could not have survived the past three years without her.

So Id like to thank Mia for her extraordinary friendship, compassion, and generosity of spirit and her daughter May who has helped shape Mia into the phenomenal woman she is, just as much as her three other beautiful kids.

Heartfelt gratitude from both Mia and me to our editor extraordinaire, Paula Ellery, who took on the daunting job of untangling hundreds of stories and poems and somehow managed to turn them into a book. Paulas beautiful spirit and editorial fingerprints are on every page of this book. It simply wouldnt exist without her and we felt blessed from the moment Paula volunteered to help us.

Special thanks go to Sian Horstead, who invested so much love, care and energy into this book, collating hundreds of stories and playing an integral role in getting this book off the ground.

Mia and I also want to thank the team at Netra Chetty Pty Ltd who so generously gave their time and talent and created something so very beautiful.

Love, light, and gratitude to all the women (and some men) who shared their stories for the purpose of this book and exposed their wounded, raw hearts. We are in a clubyou and Ia club that no one wants to be in, but a club nonetheless. But by speaking out, by telling our stories, we remind each other that we are not alone and I think we offer hope to those who today are hearing for the first time those torturous words, Im sorry but theres no heartbeat.

And to Georgie and May and all the other babies who never came home, I say this: you are not forgotten. This book is our love song to you.

Paula Ellery would like to thank:

To Deb Bath, thanks for guiding, inspiring, and encouraging me, but thanks especially for all of your beautiful contributions.

To Debbie Davis, thank you for emailing me at all hours of the night, offering advice, and giving us permission to use so many of your wonderful pieces.

To Gary Sillett (Pillars of Strength) and Dan MacDonald (SANDS), thank you for giving us permission to use whatever articles and stories we needed, and for helping to source further contributions.

To Carly Marie Dudley (Project Heal), thank you for all of your contributions the work you do is full of beauty and love and we thank you for sharing that love here.

Thanks also to Deb de Wilde and Peter Barr for offering advice in the early planning stages, which helped set the tone for this book.

And thanks to Mia, Bec, and Kim Wilkins for trusting me with this projectits been a life changing experience.

Introduction

by Mia Freedman

When I lost my unborn daughter about halfway through my second pregnancy, I retreated from the world. Even the people who loved me most and with whom I usually shared everythingmy husband, my mother, my closest girlfriendscould not reach me. And I couldnt reach them.

In truth, I didnt want to.

I wanted to curl up with my arms wrapped around my empty, swollen stomach and descend into my grief. Alone. Alone with my feelings of loss and failure. Alone with my sense that my body had betrayed me and that I had betrayed my baby by not being able to keep her alive.

I was swallowed by my grief and in the darkness I was lost to everyone, just like my baby was lost to me.

Nobody around me could understand how I felt and I secretly resented them for that. There was no one in my orbit who had ever lost a baby or had a miscarriage before and this drilled my feelings of desolation and failure even deeper.

The disconnection itself made things worse. Im usually the girl who reaches out if Im going through a tough time and suddenly I couldnt. Nobody had a roadmap. Nobody had a clue. Especially me.

It was 1999 and the Internet hadnt yet taken hold, so I couldnt Google my despair. I couldnt seek solace through reading about other womens experiences and yet thats all I wanted to do. Desperately.

I vividly recall standing in bookshop after bookshop, searching for something about miscarriage. There were shelves of books about cancer and ADHD and depression and food allergies and how to find a man, but nothing at all about miscarriage.

I couldnt possibly have felt more isolated.

With therapy and time, I eventually processed my grief. At least I thought I did.

It wasnt until 10 years later when I met Rebecca Sparrow that I truly learned what healing looked like. We were introduced by mutual friends in the weeks after Bec gave birth to her beloved daughter, Georgie, who was stillborn in 2010.

The friends Bec and I had in common hadnt been through anything remotely similar to her loss and were desperately seeking anything that might bring her some comfort. They knew Id been through a similar situation and wanted to know if there were any resources or books they could point her towards that might help ease her eviscerating pain.

I asked for Becs email and I reached out to her immediately. She reached back, having read my emotional account of losing my baby in a book that Id recently written. We talked over email for a while, and a month or two later we met in person when we were both in Byron Bay, chaperoned by one of the friends who introduced us.

We hugged and we cried and over cups of tea and pieces of cake, a deep connection was made.

That was three years ago and I cannot imagine my life without Bec in it. Our friendship was instant and while ostensibly wed come together so I could help her navigate the aftermath of losing Georgie, she helped me process my own grief in ways I hadnt even realised I needed.

There were so many things that nobody else could understand, not even our husbands. Especially not our husbands. Wonderful men both, but grief is an individual thing and there are some aspects of it unique to the parent in whose body the child lived and died. Some things must be experienced to be understood, which is why the connection between women who have lost babies is so visceral and important.

(Note: While men often grieve in very different ways to women, their suffering is no less painful and this book is intended for them too. We have included a section with some touching stories from men, along with information that men and their partners might find helpful.)

With each other, on the phone or via email, Bec and I could be brutally honest about our feelings. There are aspects of grief that are ugly and even shameful but we were able to talk about them without judgement or fear. And the little things. Like using the names of our lost daughtersGeorgie and Mayin passing conversation, acknowledging they existed. Giving each other the chance to talk about them and wonder who they might have become, if only theyd lived.

Making up silly stories about what they were doing together in heaven. Venting about the insensitivity of some people and their sucker-punch platitudes like its for the best and arent you lucky you have one already! (Heres a suggestion: dont tell a grieving mother that shes lucky.)