In Repose Blog

The Reluctant Healer

I never set out to heal anyone else but myself. I just wanted to be well so I could get back to the things I love; my family, my horses, my creative pursuits.

It took a long time for me to realize that my health battles were not to be won just so I could get back to my own life and put healing out of my mind. I was supposed to be a healer for others all along.

I just wasn't listening.

Likely one reason it was hard to accept at first is the idea that healers are somehow special or "chosen". I sure didn't think that described me at all. I didn't like the label or its lofty connotations. But we must drop the mystique around that word: healer. Those involved in the healing arts understand that the real power to heal lies not within the healer at all.

All healing is self-healing. The best healers are in truth just very good facilitators or guides who help people heal all by themselves.

Today I use reiki, quantum touch energy healing and past life regression therapy regularly to help others  find a better place to be or a little more peace in their lives. My work volunteering for NILMDTS is yet another way I am able to help others heal. Without exception, every instance where I am able to be that guide for someone else brings extra healing directly to me as well.

Tomorrow: QT and Head Trauma, a Housecall, a story regarding a recent client and the power of QT.

The White Rose

When you see a white rose pinned to the door of a room on the maternity ward of a hospital, it means the mother's child has either been born still or died shortly after birth. Sometimes the parents and family are inside the room, holding and loving their child, or children, and are waiting for the last breath to be be taken.
Some rooms are filled to capacity with family and friends. Some, only the mother perhaps. Some rooms, only the child. The rooms can be hushed and reverent or filled with loud emotion, occasionally both.

Every room, however, has the grace and presence of a multitude of angels. They are there for the baby, the family and they are there for me too.

On Call: Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep

Today I am on call for Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep. People say when they find out I do this work: "Oh that must be so hard!"

Its not that hard, actually. Well it can be, but see, its really a gift for me.

Every session I do for these families is a kind of thank you. I have two healthy, beautiful, kind and whip-smart children. Signing up for this volunteer service was the result of one of the first direct angelic communications I ever received.

I have had my ears open for more messages ever since.

Its hard to describe all of what goes on in a room where birth and death collide, but I am forever supported by the angels with copious amounts of grace as I deal with whatever type of situation I am handed. Sometimes I know what the story is with the death or impending death of the child or children, and sometimes I know very little. Parents can be angry, quiet, wailing or actually smiling at times, when other family members or clergy come to offer support.

I was hospitalized for 7 weeks with my first pregnancy with pre-term labor, my daughter was born 3 weeks early and beautifully normal. I had a 33% chance of the same problem with my second pregnancy and sure enough I started labor at just 9 weeks pregnant that time. The doctors were not very encouraging about a live birth, especially at first. After contracting constantly for a few weeks and not losing the baby they finally started me on medication. I was in and out of the hospital and had to lay quietly on my left side for  5 and a half months.

That's a hundred and seventy five DAYS.

Sitting up was discouraged, and I was told to relax as much as possible but the meds made my heart race along at 120bpm. I was lucky to be allowed to shower and the bedpan became my arch enemy.

Unless you have been there its difficult to describe how hard it is to lay that still for so very very long. My body atrophied, my energy vanished. I couldn't read because of the meds and I began to loathe the television. Minutes crawled on like they were entire days. And I had a toddler whom others had to care for.

It was a huge lesson in patience and love and I think I am still a little claustrophobic from the physical experience.

At one point in the second pregnancy at about 26 weeks, I OD'd on Magnesium Sulfate. In my mind, we both nearly died. As I was floating in that dark tunnel I could only think about my first born daughter and husband and yet to be born son. I was so so sad! And I recall vividly I was not scared at all. Just profoundly sad. My son was born one full month early. He was completely healthy and ready to go home the next day.

Every NILMDTS session I shoot provides the family with a remembrance of their child in beautiful images.

It also provides me another chance to thank God I still get to have warm hugs from mine.

Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month

2008 annual fund drive header With the Month of October being recognized as Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month, The Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep Foundation holds its Annual Fund Drive for six weeks starting in mid-September and ending in October.

President Ronald Reagan enacted Proclamation 5890 in October of 1988 to recognize that each year, approximately a million pregnancies in the United States alone end in miscarriage, stillbirth, or the death of a newborn child. 

Reagan stated, "A national observance offers us the opportunity to increase our understanding of the great tragedy involved in the deaths of unborn or newborn babies.  It also enables us to consider how, as individuals and communities, we can meet the needs of bereaved parents and family members... "

To read the full Proclamation signed by Reagan,  CLICK HERE.

If you are in a place to make even a small contribution to NILMDTS, please know that doing so will continue to allow the organization to provide improved resources, training, communication, and other tools necessary in support of our amazing contingent of professional photographers who provide the gift of free remembrance portraiture to families in need. Our next project we are working on is an online, interactive webinar version of our Formal NILMDTS Training taught by Co-Founder Sandy Puc' allowing anyone in any country with access to a computer to complete the course online. 

Donations help make programs like this a reality!

Your Donations Support the Organization in Many Ways -

• * By supporting the continued education of our volunteer photographers
• * By allowing us to further our outreach to hospitals and hospices across the world
• * By offsetting the costs associated with outreach efforts including Formal NILMDTS Traingin Seminars
• * By supporting the Family Forum which creates a productive and supportive haven for healing
• * By supporting the Photographers' Forum which provides a helpful environment for our member photographers to express their feelings and receive advice on the various issues that they face in this noble work
• * By supporting the day to day operations of our Headquarters Offices

Capturing a Short Life

CAPTURING A SHORT LIFE will screen at the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival in Hot Springs Arkansas, October 22 & 24th, 2008 and the 16th National Perinatal Bereavement Conference, October 18th, 2008 in
Clearwater, Florida

Filmmaker tackles tough subject matter and comes up with a compelling and intensely emotional
film about what happens when parents experience the beginning of their child’s life, collide with the
end of it. Dimestore Productions Inc. in association with CBC Newsworld have just released a new documentary film called Capturing A Short Life, by noteworthy Toronto director, Sheona McDonald.
This beautifully photographed film uses verité footage, interviews and still photography to tell intensely
emotional, poignant film about the tough, and often taboo, subject of infant loss. It hits right to the heart of the matter and allows the viewer access to situations rarely experienced.

“You, as parents, form a bond. And the moment that you feel that baby move inside you, you’re attached and you’re talking to it and you’ve got a relationship, you have hopes and dreams and wishes...and it all just shatters, right in front of you”

- Amanda, Hailey’s mother, Capturing A Short Life

For many, the idea of even talking about the fact that babies die, may seem disrespectful or inappropriate. Sometimes, however, the opposite is true. In many cases, parents want to talk about their babies to acknowledge that they existed. Few people are aware that in North America every year, tens of thousands of families are having to say goodbye to children they’ve only just met and millions more lose babies to miscarriage or stillbirth. When a baby dies, it is not only an infant that is lost, but a toddler, a child, a teenager and an adult. An entire life, an entire future, disappears. There will be no first birthdays, no first steps, no first report cards, no first loves…instead there is an intense, impossible, few moments to say hello and goodbye.

Capturing A Short Life is not a film about death, it is a film about how critical it is to remember and
celebrate the beautiful babies who are only with us for a moment, and how impossible it is to forget them.

Capturing A Short Life received a Jury Award at the Yorkton Short Film and Video Festival.
This is a must-see film about a subject that we, as a society, need to learn to talk about.

Thoughts on Embalming

Mostly my personal thoughts have been against embalming, and speaking about my own body, I probably still would not choose to preserve my flesh. But after attending a funeral last week, of the lovely baby pictured in the August 19 entry, I am rethinking the entire concept.

The little boy only lived a short while. He had many people in the room with him just after his birth and during his death. Friends and family and loved ones of his parents. Many people got to say hello and goodbye, with his first and his last breaths. Many many more people came to say hello and goodbye a few days later at the visitation and the funeral as well. Embalming allowed those who were NOT at the hospital a chance to do the same thing, face to face.

I have to say that in this case, the services were probably nicer for everyone, especially his parents, with the baby right there with them, than they might have been with a closed casket or an urn of ashes.

This family was a remarkable one. In the midst of the death of their child, they managed to celebrate his short life and the good things that came of it.

I was most honored to be there.

Where Birth and Death Collide

Here is a question for you. Where, on earth, might you find the greatest concentration of angels?

I know.

I have been there. Its in a hospital, in a room where birth and death collide.

Here is an image of my friend and fellow NILMDTS photographer Shannon holding baby John. (She's an angel too.)

Lovingly Handmade

I attended a one day workshop in Dallas for Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep.  There must have been forty photographers crammed into one very small room. There were some amazing stories being shared in that room.

One speaker was a doctor, a family medical therapist, who was showcasing some of the handmade items other volunteers make for photographers to use and provide as gifts for the babies and their

families. Here is a cell phone photo I took of the little flannel pocket made for the tiniest angels photographed by NILMDTS.  Even regular "premie" clothing tends to be too large to be used in some cases, and so, this soft little pocket was created to use as a prop in our shoots. I added my pen to show scale.

What we heard from the nurses is that many mothers carefully and lovingly put away these dresses, and blankets and pockets into memory boxes and, when the time is right and the need is there, they have something physical to hold and to grieve with. So,they not only have our photographs, but a tiny piece of clothing, or soft blanket, that actually belonged to their baby for a little while, to help them reconnect and remember, and heal.

Been Busy at the Hospital

The families are so grateful.  Especially those with babies who are not pink, not chubby, not perfectly formed, not beautiful in the normal way new born babies are beautiful.

The large hand here belongs to the grandmother, the tiny foot is baby Chloe, the mother is recovering in the background. I think I heard the words "thank you" and "bless you" a dozen times or more this evening. I do, feel so very blessed to be able to provide a small comfort to people whose hearts are breaking.

Bless little Chloe Elizabeth too.

There is no foot too small that it cannot leave an imprint on this world.

Important Reasons for Photographing Infants Who Have Died

A picture helps the family to confirm the existence of their baby's life and to confront the reality of their child's death.

A pictures shows parents exactly how the baby looked so they do not have to rely on imagination or the memory of impressions developed while in a state of shock and numbness. Relying on fantasy can be more frightening than reality.

A picture gives parents one way to share their special baby with other people. Photos are a means of helping families develop a support network. A photograph can be an important factor in preventing persistent, unhealthy denial, especially for families who did not actually witness their baby's death, or choose to see their infant after death.

 

Photo courtesy NILMDTS, copyright Sam Puc'

A picture may be the only tangible memory of what their baby looked like. This can be very comforting to parents who do not want to forget and fear they can't or won't remember. A picture is a means to capture an irretrievable opportunity which, once lost, can never be recovered.

A picture provides a way to get in touch with the positive aspects of remembrance and assists parents to recall their soothing and comforting memories. To identify with positive aspects of mourning as well as the pain of the loss.

From the RTS Bereavement Services Training Manual from Gunderson Lutheran Medical Foundation and Cathy Bon, RN, MSN

(This photograph is of Cheryl Haggard and her son Maddux.  Cheryl and the photographer, Sandy "Sam" Puc' started the organization, NILMDTS, together after both realized the importance of capturing Maddux's portrait for his family.)