It’s time for us all to stop grieving in silence
Michelle La Fontaine arrived at Queen’s Park this week with a crystal bracelet and a plan to talk openly about an intimate, taboo subject.
The bracelet is made mostly of pink and blue crystals — one for each of her twins who were born 19 weeks premature 10 years ago. The first one, Joseph, was stillborn. Elora lived for six minutes before she died in La Fontaine’s and her husband Tyler’s arms. Can you imagine the horror? If they had been toddlers, there would have been funerals, memorial trees, hugs and tissues and weeks of lasagna left lovingly outside the La Fontaine’s front door.
But because they were not “viable,” Elora and Joseph were photographed, had their prints gently done and then went to the medical waste bin. And once she left the hospital, La Fontaine was greeted by deafening silence.
“Even in my own family, people tiptoed around it and then no one said anything at all,” says La Fontaine, 40.
That’s the chilling norm in our society. We don’t recognize miscarriages and pre-term baby death as losses. In fact, we learn not to reveal our pregnancies until they’ve passed the 13-week safety line because chances are good — one in four — that the pregnancy won’t last.
It’s as if we collectively decided it’s better to grieve alone than face the humiliation of a public loss. But why should we feel shame about losing a child?
It’s not just friends and family who are awkward and at a loss for words over failed pregnancies or stillborn babies. It’s health professionals, too.
I’ll tell you a personal story. The same year La Fontaine delivered her twins, I was lying on the examination table of an ultrasound clinic for my 12-week pregnancy appointment. While she was waving her wand over my belly, the technician was chatty and friendly. Then she put the wand inside me, and she went completely silent. There was a big sign at my feet declaring that technicians couldn’t discuss their findings with patients. I didn’t get any printouts. I didn’t get any information. All she said was: “Go directly to your midwife’s clinic.”
I made some calls to management at various Ontario hospitals and it seems that treatment at hospitals varies wildly. Many offer memory services to parents of stillborn babies who were over 20-weeks of gestational age — portraits, footprints, a naming ceremony or baptism, arrangements for the body to be sent to a funeral home if requested.
Arrive to Sunnybrook Hospital 15 weeks pregnant and bleeding, staff will move you out of the emergency room to the obstetrics floor and ensure you leave with a bereavement folder packed with helpful links, says pediatric nurse practitioner Wendy Moulsdale.
But when it came to special services or counselling for women in the midst of a miscarriage, meaning they are less than 20 weeks pregnant, only three hospitals offered any.
“There’s ignoring and silence, and a total lack of training in our stateof-the-art health-care system,” says Mike Colle, MPP for EglintonLawrence.
His daughter lost three babies. He describes her hospital experiences as “trauma added to trauma.” She got support from the Pregnancy and Infant Loss Network — a small non-profit that offers counselling and peer support groups for grieving parents like her. Colle met some of the volunteer members. He was horrified by their stories.
Most of them ended like La Fontaine’s — with a crying woman, alone, frantically searching on the Internet for tenderness and reassurance that she was not crazy, and her feelings of loss and despair were deserved.
“We have a two-tier treatment for mothers who are pregnant. If it’s a successful birth there is cheer, joy and care. If something goes wrong, the nurse walks out on you, they send you home or leave you in the hall for hours or next door to a room with a crying baby being born,” says Colle. “Then you go home, and no one talks about it. You are supposed to suffer in silence.”
He changed that this week, which is why La Fontaine was at Queen’s Park wearing her bracelet.
Members of the provincial government unanimously supported a private member’s bill Colle wrote, declaring Oct. 15 Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Day across the province, and calling for more support programs and research into the causes of miscarriages and stillborn births. Colle expects it to create pregnancy and infant-loss teams at every hospital in Ontario, and at least Lakeridge Health’s women and children’s health program director Elaine Goulbourne said her hospital in Oshawa is taking it that way.
“We recognize we have some opportunities to provide emotional support to families experiencing an early loss,” she said.
Health Minister Dr. Eric Hoskins tweeted that the law was “the first of its kind in North America.”
Remarkably, members from all three political parties rose again in Queen’s Park to tell stories about their own personal — or their constituents’ — brushes with this kind of loss. Let’s hope the rest of us will start to follow suit.
Of his daughter, Colle says “there is finally a smile on her face.”
There certainly was one on La Fontaine’s.
She was thinking about her children — not just the two she lost that day, but the three that she still has.
“If they ever go through a tragic loss,” she says, “they will never know how bad it used to be in Ontario.” Catherine Porter can be reached at cporter@thestar.ca.