Pregnancy and infant loss memorial day

This year on Pregnancy and Infant Loss Memorial Day - the second year we have marked this occasion - I was asked to speak on a national TV news program on behalf of Sands, about what it is like when your baby dies. I have been a volunteer with Sands for quite a while now and I considered it a privilege to speak on behalf of all of us who are grieving and missing a child. 

It all happened very quickly, as I guess it does on those kind of programs. I found out at 4pm the day before that they wanted to run the story, and we were to appear at 8.30am the following morning. There had been some talk amongst the program producers that perhaps the topic wasn't quite the thing for a breakfast program but I am pleased they decided it was important enough to risk that people might choke from distate on their breakfast cereal.

I am quite comfortable public speaking. I have done quite a few talks for Sands now on my experience as a bereaved parent, and of course being a teacher the ability to put yourself up in front of a not-always friendly crowd is a key skill you develop quite early on in the piece. This was my first time being interviewed on television, though, and both Leslie and I were quite nervous about what to expect.

It was an early start for all of us, made slightly more difficult by the fact that Alice had quite an unsettled night, so I was running on empty a bit. We made it their for our allotted time, however (quite a feat, I thought, with a six-month-old baby in tow!) and before we knew it we were being whizzed through hair and makeup for a spruce-up and very quickly chaperoned on set.

The set itself is actually a lot less intimidating than you'd imagine. There are no cameramen these days (who knew?) as everything is automated and run by a bunch of button pushers in an office in another room. It was just the three of us, the two hosts and the one floor guy who did all the count-ins to the segments and generally kept everyone doing what they were supposed to be doing.

In previous lives, Les and I had both been on television before, but never for something this personal and this important. I was a contestant once on The Weakest Link (narrowly missing out on the $25,000 prize money in the final round of 'sudden death', and Leslie had famously once auditioned for Australian Idol and was so genuinely awful that he made the show as one of the 'you had to be there to believe it' stories they intersperse between the genuinely talented people)

I think the interview went quite well, although it was a lot shorter than I had imagined. There was so much I could have said, and at times they kind of put words in our mouth, and to be honest I'm still not entirely sure what their angle was (how to help people who've lost a child? putting a face to the statistics? raising awareness?), but we received a lot of positive feedback and I think the folk at Sands did too. Leslie shared the video with his workmates and quite a few of them then opened up to him about their baby brother who had died of SIDS or another baby in their family that was stillborn. 

The best thing about putting yourself out there as we have done since Max died is that you open a dialogue for people to respond in kind. This is not only valuable in terms of making the death of a baby a less isolating topic to experience and talk about, but has also enabled us to forge really special connections with people we might otherwise not have. Our relationships - the ones that have survived intact throughout all this - are stronger, deeper and more enduring because of it. For that we count ourselves very lucky indeed.

Here is the video. 

As I'm sure you'll agree, baby Alice completely stole the show, and should probably employ her own agent as a matter of urgency. I was concerned when they wanted Alice to appear on screen that they might be tempted to trivialise the uncomfortable dead-baby parts and push the 'and look, here's a happy ending!' as the focus of the story. I hope that it didn't come across like this. It was hard to talk about the nuances of navigating parenthood as a survivor of neonatal death in such a short interview, and that is the one thing I wish they'd given more time to. I'm happy if she acted as a symbol of hope for those who might be feeling as hopeless as we did in those early months, but I'd hate to think that having a healthy, beautiful, subsequent baby with us did not rub salt in the wounds of those we hoped to reach out to the most.

Alice really was this well behaved the whole time we were there. She was turning on the charm to whoever would look her way. The tongue thing she does is a new skill she's learned and she seemed very excited to show it off on national television. We shall be saving the footage for the little miss's twenty-first birthday, that's for sure!