THIS MAY COME as a shock to you, but 8 babies are stillborn every day in the UK. That’s around 5,000 a year – 75% of the deaths of children under 16 years old. Tragically, 1 in 4 stillborns die of unknown causes.
There are many worthy charities working at researching the causes and helping families with the effects. An estimated 4.2 million women live with depression linked to stillbirth. What isn’t readily reported, and what seems to be lacking from all the advice on these charity websites, is the effect stillbirths have on the father. Here is one man’s side of the story.
On 29th July this year, my wife and I had our first child together. What we didn’t expect was for our beautiful daughter, Sophia, to be stillborn at 34 weeks. We found out 2 days prior to her birth that our little girl had died in the womb. At what should have been a routine antenatal appointment, my wife was prescribed a tablet to induce labour and sent home to wait for 48 hours.
I realised that, no matter who you are, if your wife has to give birth to your dead child, you need to be there 100%; to encourage her and make her feel as loved and as comfortable as she can throughout this most traumatic experience. My wife, Elizabeth, was amazing that night and, despite our loss, we were both in a place of strange euphoria after her amazing effort to bring our little girl into the world. I would say it is one of the very small positives I have been able to take from such a devastating experience. For my wife, being able to give birth was one of the very last things she could as a mum for our baby, and it is something that I feel immensely proud of her for.
In the days following our daughter’s death, I went into a form of shock. I felt like I was in a sort of bubble and it was the numbest feeling I have ever had. I just wanted to be there for my wife – as she was for me – and everything seemed surreal and strangely calm. Despite all our instincts saying: “Sleep, rest, recuperate”, we were lucky to have the sacred time spent with Sophia in a quiet hospital room; precious time with our child; the perfect time to create lasting memories. The brutality of picking your once warm baby up the day after she has been in a ‘cold cot’ (that is essentially a fridge; to keep her from deteriorating), is one of the toughest things that I have done and it broke my heart all over again.
The nature of this event is that a lot of the focus is rightly on the mother – who has not only gone through the discomfort of pregnancy and the pain of giving birth, but also the agony of knowing her baby is dead. Nothing can be taken away from the trauma that a woman physically and emotionally faces at this time. However, there seems to be this preordained belief many around us harbour that the man is to become this rock who holds up the family, like Atlas.
Honestly, we are broken too, and we can do absolutely nothing except support our partner and try to hold it together. I went into ‘auto pilot’ and became a functioning person just so I could get through the day. I returned to work after 2 days – in retrospect, one of the worst things I could have done. It should not have been the time to be macho, but the time to be supportive and, if you have other children, as I do, understand their needs, for they are going through their own grieving process.
I also looked for ways to help myself cope with my overbearing pain. My personal ‘reach-for’ was to write, to exercise and to drink wine; it took me somewhere else – I didn’t want to be in my head 24/7 because the pain was too great. I talked with people who had experienced baby loss; I also read books and engaged in therapy. All of these things have helped me, yet every day I stumbled on conflicting emotions and struggled with the fact that I don’t have my little girl to hold and protect; to look at with awe and marvel at our creation.
As men, we are allowed to cry, we are allowed to feel upset and angry at what has happened; to want to curl up and hide away. These are all healthy emotions – we need to allow them to surface. All my distractions; work, wine, writing, etc, suppressed the natural process which would have helped me to grieve properly.
I now take time out once a week for me, and this time is devoted to anything that allows me to think, breath and, if there is grief waiting to show itself, the opening is there. It has made a huge difference to my mental well-being, and although the feeling of grief and deep sadness is still frequent, it is no longer all-consuming.
For any of you reading this that have been through losing a child, I am so sorry for your loss. I am only in the early stage of coming to terms with mine, but my advice is to honour your grief and be kind to yourself. The world needs me to be a better man, so I can be the example that Sophia can look down on with pride.
Should you wish to contact me, my email is: Nigelpanter7@aol.com
