Heartfelt is an amazing volunteer organisation of professional photographers who help create photographic memories for families that have experienced stillbirths, premature and ill infants, and children with serious and terminal illnesses. It has been in the media quite a bit lately, which is a wonderful thing. The more people that have heard of Heartfelt, the greater chance there is that some one of your family and friends will be able to point you in their direction should you, or someone you know, ever experience the death of a child.
Unfortunately, Leslie and I had not heard of Heartfelt when Max died, and despite the fact that the organisation does a lot of work with hospitals to increase information about their services, the hospital did not tell us about them. Since I have seen the kinds of beautiful images that Heartfelt photographers so generously take, this has been one of my biggest regrets. How I wish I'd known someone, anyone, who could have told me about this service at the time when it really mattered. And time does matter. You can't get the time with your baby back to make better decisions. Once it has gone, it has gone. There can be no more photos.
I can't remember how I first heard of Heartfelt after we got home from the hospital. It may have been from one of the thousands of Google searches I did about neonatal death and dying babies, trying to figure out what the hell had just happened to us. Then, when I went back to work, I found myself working with a new staff member who is a family friend of Gavin Blue, the director and founder of Heartfelt. If only I'd met her a few months before.
I know, however, that we are fortunate to have any photos at all. Some people don't have any. It shouldn't be that way. As we lay with our brand new baby boy after he was delivered, shell shocked, the midwives who had brought him into the world sat with us for what seemed like a very long time. Just talking to us and stroking Max and telling us how beautiful he was. One of them was a brand new midwife, only 22 or 23 years old, who'd been there with us the whole time. She was amazing, but didn't seem very happy with the photographs she had tried to take of Max for us. The other was an older, very experienced midwife, who'd come in only when Max was very close to being born, and who stayed with us for a long time throughout the night.
This woman had seen many, many babies die. I remember asking her about it. 'Is your heart heavy?' I asked her, and she said that it most certainly was; that she carried the memories of every single one of those babies with her every day. But, she said, one of the 'benefits', if you could call it that, of having experienced so many babies die, that she had become very good at taking photos of them and their families, and that this is something she enjoyed doing for them. She went and got a camera and took some beautiful, intimate photos of us with Max, that we will forever treasure. Unfortunately the hospital weren't able to give us digital copies, so they don't reproduce well out of the booklet they were carefully placed in. Here are some of the loving, thoughtful photos she captured:
In the morning, someone asked us did we want the hospital photographer to visit, and we agreed to that. We didn't realise that she was probably a forensic photographer - used to taking photos for official purposes like autopsies, probably. She took some really raw, confronting photos, very different in style to the ones taken by the midwife. Though I am immensely grateful for them, those images make me cry every time I look at them. I did send an email to her to tell her how much it meant for us to have the photos (her email address was on the CD of photos the hospital provided to us) but I never heard anything back from her. I felt sad about that.
Last week, on the 7.30 Report, this segment on Heartfelt was aired. Please watch it. My new friend Sally, who I recently wrote about, is featured on the segment in a photo of her, her husband, and her little daughter Hope. It's a beautiful photo. Watch this video of the work Heartfelt do, too.
File away this information for when you hear of someone, near or far, who might need it. Families who are in shock and distress aren't able to think clearly. They need someone to do it for them. In our case, the next day in hospital, we were all alone, with no family to come in an take over to figure out all of this external stuff as we so desperately needed them to do. Leslie's mum sadly died three years ago, and mine is interstate. That's one thing I wish we'd had that day, an advocate - someone to ask the questions we were not capable of asking, to take the photos we were not capable of taking.
You can read more about Heartfelt on their website, or in the following news articles:
