The most moving testament to parental love you’ll ever read
Baby Rory was stillborn but for three weeks his mum and dad cuddled, bathed and sang to him. Their story’s ...
‘He was gorgeous — as perfect as any newborn’ ‘I loved him as much as I did our other children’
THE photo shows a baby: doll-like, peaceful, button-nosed, nestled in his mother’s arms, the focus of his parents’ fond, adoring gaze. Rory Bell’s tiny cheeks are rosy. His eyes are closed as if in sleep. We might assume his parents are celebrating his birth. But actually they are mourning his death, because days before this picture was taken, Rory was stillborn and his mother Lynsey’s life, threatened by a massive haemorrhage, hung by a thread.
Just before she was rushed into theatre for emergency surgery, Lynsey was told the baby she had carried for eight months had died in her womb. Then for two agonising days her husband Mark believed he would lose not only his fourth child, but also his wife.
‘The doctors told me to prepare for the worst,’ says Mark. ‘Our son had been born dead and Lynsey could also die. My biggest worry was how I’d tell our other three children that their little brother wasn’t coming home and neither was their mummy.
‘I also felt my responsibilities to Rory acutely. Though he was dead I didn’t want him lying in a cold mortuary. I couldn’t bear the thought of him being there alone. Though his body was lifeless, I wanted him to be snuggled up beside me.
‘So for four hours I lay down on a bed in an empty delivery suite with Rory at my side. I sang to him, cuddled him and told him stories about his brother and sisters. I wanted him to be loved just as we love our other children.
‘I prayed a lot, too, that Lynsey would survive the surgery, and the next day I carried Rory down to see his mummy in intensive care, and though she was unconscious, I lay him down in the crook of her arm.
‘The doctors had told me she might not pull through and I wanted her to meet Rory in case she died, too.’
Miraculously, Lynsey survived six major haemorrhages, but her climb back to health was a slow one, and during the 11 days she spent in hospital she and Mark made a resolution: they would store up as many memories of Rory, their second son, as they could.
Rory was a baby whose heart had stopped beating, but he was their child, nonetheless, and loved with the same intensity as their other children — Daisy, now ten, seven-year-old Max and Poppy, four.
Eighteen days elapsed between their little boy’s stillbirth and his funeral, and during that time Lynsey and Mark Bell treated him much as they would have a living child.
They changed his nappy, washed him, sang to him, cuddled him and read him stories. And on the day before his funeral, in August 2014, they took him to Lynsey’s parents’ home, where he was at their side for their final night with him.
During those precious hours, they bonded with him. And because after seeing them each day he was returned to the hospital mortuary, his body did not change with time. He remained, to the casual onlooker, the image of a peacefully sleeping baby.
‘It was as if he defied science,’ says Lynsey. ‘He was perfect. For 18 days he looked exactly like a living baby. He wasn’t stiff. It was like holding a newborn. You could wrap his fingers round yours and his arms and legs were flexible.
‘But, of course, we knew we couldn’t keep him with us all day, so we rationed the time we had with him. In the end, the fact he was cold became reassuring. If he’d started to get warm we would have worried. We knew, too, that once his funeral came we’d never see him again, so we wanted to know as much as possible about him.
‘I asked the midwife if I could undress him. I wanted to know if there were any birth marks I hadn’t seen.
‘We asked, too, if we could make casts of his hand and footprints, and I changed his nappy. Even stillborn babies pass meconium [the first faeces of a newborn] and as a mum I wanted to know that my baby was clean and well looked after.
‘So going back and forth to the mortuary to fetch him, kiss him, change him and give him a cuddle became our normality. For those weeks in hospital we lived in a bubble.’ Lynsey and Mark’s other children never met Rory: it was their parents’ view that they were far too young to face the awful finality of his death.
So the thoughts that Daisy, Max and Poppy retain of their baby brother are happy ones, based on the photos of him at their home in Newcastle upon Tyne, and in their happy belief that he lives now in heaven, a ‘little angel’.
When Lynsey, 33, a nursery nurse, discovered in December 2013 that she was pregnant for the fourth time, she was shocked: ‘It was a really big surprise. We were two happy parents with three lovely children: our family was complete.
‘I remember thinking: “What are we going to do?” But by my 20-week scan, when we knew we were having a boy, my heart had melted.
‘We bought everything new: a pushchair, crib, even a little bouncy chair that was all set up in the sitting room. The pram was in the corner and the crib was ready upstairs. Rory was to share a room with his big brother. Everything was prepared.’
However, Lynsey was steeling herself for a difficult pregnancy. She had developed the potentially life-threatening condition pre-eclampsia — dangerously high blood pressure — when pregnant with her other children and knew her fourth pregnancy was also likely to be problematic.
Indeed, 35 weeks in, she developed very high blood pressure and was put on medication. A day later, on July 31, 2014, she went into labour.
She and Mark, a technical operator in a factory, arrived at hospital to devastating news.
Tests revealed Lynsey had again developed pre-eclampsia, but worse followed: a scan showed her baby’s heartbeat had stopped.
‘Mark’s hand squeezed mine and my eyes filled with tears,’ she says. ‘Everything on the scan was still. I could see no beating heart, not a flicker of life.
‘I knew straight away something was wrong. Then the doctor took my hand and said: “I’m so sorry. He’s gone.” ’
The baby had died when the placenta had detached; probably as Lynsey walked into hospital. Death would have been instantaneous as his oxygen supply was cut off.
Lynsey recalls: ‘I lay on the bed and thought: “What’s that noise?” It was me, screaming, but in my head it sounded as if it was coming from somewhere else, not from my mouth.
‘I used to work in a hospital, as a health care assistant in paediatric intensive care, and I learned then that there is no cry like a mother’s when her child dies.
‘And it was me who was making that
sound. I felt as if a train had smacked into me.
‘Then there was a stabbing pain in my stomach. They told me I’d have to go through labour and give birth to my stillborn baby. I said to Mark: “I just can’t go through it. Please let them give me a caesarean.” I couldn’t imagine the horror of it.’
Distraught with pain and grief, she was taken to a delivery suite, but she began to haemorrhage catastrophically and was rushed into theatre for an emergency caesarean.
‘Mark took my hand and I know now he told me he loved me, but by then I was drifting into unconsciousness. I heard doors smacking open, felt a mask on my face and a million lights seemed to shine on me. There was noise, then nothing — until I woke up two days later.’ By then, just as dawn broke on Friday, August 1, 2014, their son Rory had been stillborn. Meanwhile, doctors were fighting to save Lynsey’s life.
She suffered six major haemorrhages and kidney failure, and was given 15 blood transfusions.
Having failed to stem the flood of blood any other way, surgeons
finally had to perform an emergency hysterectomy. Mark, waiting outside the operating theatre for news, feared that he would be planning two funerals.
He and Lynsey had been together since they were 18. She was the only girl he had ever loved. The thought of losing her as well as their son all but crushed him.
‘I remember saying to the doctors: “You can have my leg; anything. Just save her.” ’
By the Saturday evening, Lynsey, in intensive care, still hovered between life and death and Mark knew he must introduce her to their new son, named, as she had wished, Rory. He nestled their boy under her arm.
‘I opened my eyes and remember Mark saying “You know Rory is here?” and for a split second he must have glimpsed hope in my eyes because he said: “You do remember what happened, don’t you? You know they couldn’t save him?” I did remember. Then I lost consciousness again.’
Two days on, Lynsey was alert enough to meet her son.
‘When Mark brought him to me I could see how gorgeous he was. I’d imagined the horror of a dead body. But he was as perfect as any newborn. His cheeks were rosy. He looked exactly like a living baby.
‘I gave him a kiss. I cuddled him. Unlike an adult, he did not have rigor mortis. His legs and arms were flexible. The midwife had dressed him in a blue babygro and he wore a navy cardigan one of my mum’s friends had knitted and one of Max’s red hats.
‘Round his neck was a rosary bead necklace, because after he’d been born Mark had called the priest to bless him — we’re Catholic.
‘The hardest bit, the bit I struggled with, was touching his face and feeling that it was cold. But he was my baby and I’d carried him for eight months and I loved him as much as I did all my other children.’
The midwife at the Royal Victoria Hospital, Newcastle, assigned to look after Rory accorded him the same tender care that she would any newborn.
‘To her he was still a baby,’ says Lynsey. ‘She dressed him and put special cream onto his face to stop him dehydrating, and brought him to me whenever I wanted to see him. It was lovely.’ Four days after Rory’s birth, Lynsey resolved to store up memories of her son in which she would find succour for the rest of her life. She and Mark arranged a second, full blessing for him: this time he wore a new, white sleepsuit.
‘I held him throughout and it was like a christening,’ she says. ‘The priest said, “May the angels watch over him”, and he talked of the children’s heaven he would go to, and that reassured us.’
Then, for the following week, as family members rallied to look after their other children, Lynsey and Mark immersed themselves in a separate life with their baby son, who seemed held in life-like suspension.
Yet they knew they must relinquish him before the inevitable processes of nature destroyed him. After 11 days, Lynsey was discharged from hospital and Rory was transferred to a funeral home.
‘We asked for him to be in an open casket,’ she says. ‘He still looked perfect. I’d taken a pair of pale blue dungarees that had been his brother’s. Max wanted him to wear them.’
Six more days passed and Rory’s parents continued to visit him. Sometimes they took him out of the tiny casket to cuddle him.
Lynsey wrote poems to him, and on August 17, the day before his funeral, they arranged their final parting.
‘We went to Mum and Dad’s house and we took Rory in his casket and laid him on a chair,’ says Lynsey.
‘I read him Guess How Much I Love You, and we left him with that story.
‘That last night we sat on the sofa and he was there beside us. We thought about the hardest day we’d ever face when we’d say our final goodbye. We played music to him, talked to him and held his tiny hand.
‘You think, “Have we done it all? Is there anything we’ve forgotten?” We wondered if it was right not to let the children meet him, but we made the best decisions we could at the time. And then when the morning came and we had to put the coffin lid down on him for the last time, we’d agreed Mark should do it.
‘But he couldn’t. That was when it hit him. He had to say goodbye and he couldn’t. So I put the lid down.
‘I didn’t collapse until the funeral car arrived and then everything crashed down around me. I sat on the stairs and sobbed.’
The funeral was a final valediction, but Lynsey and Mark Bell had already said a long farewell to their boy. For 18 days they held him, cosseted him, dressed him, loved him.
‘As a parent you have a responsibility to your child, living or dead,’ says Lynsey.
‘The shelves of a mortuary are cold and awful places. I didn’t want my baby to lie alone there.
‘I wanted him to be as cosy as possible, wrapped in a blanket and surrounded by love. He was dead, but he was still my child, and I would have found it harder to grieve for him if I had not had those days with him.
‘As it is, we did everything possible. We took photos. We got to know our boy. He had auburn hair and the smallest little button nose.’
Lynsey is stoic, dry-eyed. Two years on, Rory remains there, at the forefront of her memory.
His grave in Gosforth is awash with summer flowers. A candle burns in a glass case. And every two or three days, she and Mark visit their youngest child.
‘We still haven’t let Rory go,’ she says, ‘but now we can remember him with smiles.’
To donaTe to charities in Rory’s name, go to: facebook.com/ rememberingrory
‘We took photos and got to know our little auburn-haired boy’