When pregnant mom Anna Eastland went to B.C. Women’s Hospital in early labour she expected to come home with a healthy baby girl.
For the majority of her pregnancy, everything had been fine, but Eastland’s daughter Josephine was stillborn, strangled by the umbilical cord.
“There is nothing I could have done,” Eastland recalled of her daughter’s stillbirth three years ago.
While such deaths are rare, they do still happen. Approximately, one in 200 births is stillborn, according to the provincial health ministry.
A stillbirth is defined as the loss of an infant after 20 weeks of pregnancy but before the baby is born.
In addition to problems with the umbilical cord, stillbirths happen for a variety of other reasons including birth defects, a problem with the mother’s health, such as diabetes, high blood pressure; or a problem with the placenta, according to the ministry.
Eastland said she is speaking about her painful experience publicly to bring comfort to herself and others in the same situation.
“Your heart is already broken open and if you can be brave enough to be vulnerable and let that pain out, then you have the possibility to let hope in again and be more healed,” she said.
Eastland added that baby-loss moms sometimes fall into self-hatred or blame themselves for the loss.
“If your baby has died inside of you, you can feel like you are a tomb – like you are a place of death and like you are a failure like your body has failed your child,” she said. “No – my body was a place of life for my child, a place of love.”
Eastland also wants other parents going through the grief of a stillbirth to know that it is OK to grieve intensely over someone other people didn’t meet.
“You, as a mother, loved this child so deeply from the start,” she said.
How the medical community responds to the loss in its immediate aftermath can make a big difference, Eastland noted.
At B.C. Women’s Hospital, the staff referred to Josephine by name or as “your daughter,” which helped, Eastland said. “They were never clinical or cold,” Eastland said, of the nursing staff. A nurse promised to stay with Josephine when Eastland had to leave the hospital to go home after the baby died.
“That just meant so much,” Eastland recalled.
Staff also presented the family with plaster casts of the baby’s feet to take home as a memento.
“The way you treat the woman and the husband and the little baby who has passed away can really make a difference to promote or hinder healing,” she said.
The family, including Eastland’s other five children, held Josephine after she died.
“That was a blessing because the children could see she was a beautiful little person and they could have this loving image of their sister and not a scary, mysterious idea that death took their sister,” she said. The kids also each put a tiny toy in the coffin for Josephine.
The family also watched a lot of The Muppet Show in the weeks after the death.
“We needed to laugh. We were so exhausted from grief and we needed our kids to know, ‘We still love you. Everything is OK. Life will continue,’” she said.
The worst thing family, friends and strangers can do is ignore the loss or say is “it was meant to be,” according to Eastland.
The best thing people can do is to let the mother and family know they are supported and loved.
Many cooked for Eastland and her family in the week’s after the loss, which was a big help, she said.
She advises women who have lost a baby to seek community.
“Connecting with other baby-loss moms has really, really helped my healing,” she said.
Something someone told her when she lost Josephine was that her daughter was literally always with her.
“The baby’s DNA goes into your bloodstream and in fact, it remains in the bloodstream for the rest of your life,” Eastland said. “So in your very body, you carry your child forever.”
A stillbirth does not mean the woman cannot have future healthy pregnancies, medical experts say.
Eastland has had a healthy son since Josephine and is currently expecting a baby girl. For more on Eastland and how she coped with her loss, go to her blog, eastofcrazyland.com.
