The new mother who spent 16 days caring for her dead baby
EvErY parent expects to be woken up during the night by the cries of their baby. But after putting their five-month-old daughter in the cot at the end of their bed, Jodie and Matthew McAtamney-greenwood had to survive those dark hours with a terrible, aching silence.
At 6am, when they went to lift Trinity out of her cot, there were none of the usual coos. Only complete stillness.
Trinity, who was born with an underdeveloped heart, had suffered a cardiac arrest three weeks before. On the date of her death in August 2015, she was one of at least 15 babies who died that day in the UK just before, during or within six months of birth.
Yet despite the agony, Jodie and Matthew still believe that taking her lifeless body home the day before her funeral — in a specially cooled bassinet that preserves infants’ bodies — helped them begin to come to terms with their loss.
‘It was incredibly hard watching her lying lifeless in her cot when, a few weeks earlier, she’d been rolling on her side and playing with her little hands,’ says Jodie, 25.
‘This time, we put her into her cot in a wicker basket that was fitted with a cooling pad to keep her body cold, so we could spend more time with her. now, instead of being warm and rosy-cheeked, she was not frozen but was cool to the touch, as if she’d been taken for a walk on a winter’s day.
‘All night, I sat up in bed watching her, thinking “Maybe, you’ll surprise us and open your eyes”, yet knowing that wasn’t going to happen. But as painful as it was, I’m still so glad that Trinity was home with us for that last night. It’s where she belonged.’
Just a few years ago, babies who died were usually spirited away by medical staff, who said it was ‘for the best’. And as recently as the 1980s, some mothers never saw their stillborn child because it was seen as kinder not to allow them to bond in the first place.
But thanks to changing attitudes to child bereavement, as well as the CuddleCot — which contains an electric cooling system attached to a mat to keep the body temperature low — mothers are taking their babies home to care for them in the days before their funerals.
Often concealed in bassinets to give the appearance of a living baby sleeping, CuddleCots enable parents to spend time with their child before their final parting. The baby can be held, dressed and taken for walks like a living child.
Many people were surprised, though, when the widespread use of the devices was revealed last week.
It came to light when 21-year-old Charlotte Szakacs and her husband Attila, 28, from York, told how they had used the equipment to care for their daughter Evelyn for two weeks after she died due to a chromosome disorder a month after birth.
So, are parents simply being allowed to live in denial? Or, as macabre as this sounds, can delaying the inevitable decay of a baby’s body — and allowing families to say goodbye in their own time — help them deal with their loss?
The evidence is that it does indeed help. A recent review of the research in the journal Birth found that removing a child from its parents too early leaves them not only unable to process their grief, but with the gnawing feeling that their child never mattered.
As result of such findings, 92 per cent of British hospitals offer CuddleCots to bereaved families.
AgrOwIng number of hospices and funeral homes also supply the cots, which were launched six years ago by a Midlands company and cost about £1,500 each.
Erica Stewart, a bereavement support specialist at stillbirth and neonatal death charity Sands, says: ‘In years gone by, keeping the babies away was seen as a way to protect the mothers, who were often told to go home and try for another child.
‘Thanks to advances in psychology and counselling, we know that when parents have good bereavement care and can stay with their children, it has a positive impact on their future mental health.’
Some parents can stay with their baby for up to a month, says Erica, as there is no immediate deadline for burial nor any infection risks from the body of a newborn baby.
‘It normally just comes to a natural end, with the parents knowing when it’s time to say goodbye,’ she says. ‘That time spent together can help any mother — whether they have lost a baby at birth or several months afterwards. There is no hierarchy in grief.’
Jodie, a lifeguard from Chessington, Surrey, knows the pain of both only too well. She lost her first daughter, Serenity, in April 2014, when, for unexplained reasons, she died in the womb.
A refrigerated bassinet allowed Jodie to keep Serenity with her in hospital for three days.
Then, with unbearable poignancy, after she and husband Matthew donated a CuddleCot for other families in memory of their daughter, they used one again when their second daughter, Trinity, died from an unrelated heart defect.
‘we do wonder: “why us?”’ says Jodie. ‘There is no answer, so we just have to live each day as it comes.
‘with Serenity, I didn’t want to see her for 12 hours because I didn’t know what to expect. But when I held her, I found it comforting because, though she was dead, she was still my baby to care for.
‘with Trinity, it was different because I got to see her smile, sing her nursery rhymes and make silly voices to make her laugh.’
ThE family were on a trip to wales when Trinity died suddenly. Jodie visited her child’s body every day at the hospital mortuary, but on the night before her funeral, she decided to bring her daughter home.
‘She was in the white wicker basket she was going to be buried in the next day. we had our friends and family come and spend time cuddling her. I held her a lot, because it was the last hug she was ever going to have.’
It’s hard to imagine such agony. Yet Jodie believes having her daughter home again was invaluable.
‘It helped because I would have felt guilty if she hadn’t spent the last night where she belonged,’ she says. ‘I would still rather have that memory of her at home than the memory of seeing the hospital staff trying to resuscitate her.’
nursery nurse Lynsey Bell agrees. when her son rory died in August 2014 during childbirth, she and her husband Mark changed his nappy, washed him, sang to him, cuddled him and read him stories for the 18 days until his funeral.
The day before the service, they took him to Lynsey’s parents’ home, where he was at their side for their final night together.
‘People are so wrong if they think parents are playing mummy and daddy with dead babies — it’s not like that at all,’ says Lynsey, 33, from newcastle upon Tyne.
‘we’re not living in some fantasy world. we know the baby is no longer there.
‘But having rory for those days helped give us closure. By the time we said goodbye, we knew every last inch of him. You want to take in every little ounce of them because you know you’re never going to see them again. That time is precious because it’s all we have.’
Psychologist Dr Deborah Davis, author of Empty Cradle, Broken heart: Surviving The Death Of Your Baby, agrees.
‘Parents get to be parents, and express their love in physical ways, such as admiring features, bathing, dressing and sleeping with their little one,’ she says.
‘Setting their own pace offers parents a sense of control, which can minimise the trauma of letting go.’
So it was for Josie Pavey after her daughter, Billy-rose, died aged six months in December 2012.
At first, Billy-rose was not expected to survive her birth. At 34 weeks pregnant, Josie, a healthcare training consultant from Frome, Somerset, was told her baby was suffering from hydranencephaly, a condition in which the brain is not fully formed.
In an almost unimaginable stroke