Information from the National Stillbirth Society

The body of evidence is growing that fetal heartbeat monitoring is an effective tool in identifying signs of a potential stillbirth before it has a chance to occur. It is the next step up from Kick Counting and looks at the baby's heartbeat in cases where the potential for loss is above average, possibly due to an earlier stillbirth. (Go to our site, www.protectyourpregnancy.com, and click on the link in the last paragraph for a pamphlet explaining the procedure available on an experimental basis from The Pregnancy Institute.)

Next go to http://www.nbc11.com/video/17479363/index.html# to see a newscast feature from NBC Channel 11 San Francisco. It is an interview with a stillbirth mother who, having lost a daughter a year ago, is using a home monitor to safeguard her current pregnancy. After testing she sends the results via the Internet to The Pregnancy Institute where they're reviewed. She is called if the printout suggest her baby is in any distress. For infomation you can email Dr. Jason Collins at haydel1@bellsouth.net.

Richard K. Olsen
Founder & Executive Director
The National Stillbirth Society
www.stillnomore.org

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A Mother's Meditation on Loss

AN EXACT REPLICA OF A FIGMENT OF MY IMAGINATION
A Memoir
By Elizabeth McCracken
Little, Brown. 184 pp. $19.99

Some friends and I used to call ourselves "The Dead Babies Club." We would meet for brunch and talk about our losses -- miscarriages, stillbirths, terminations after amnios revealed acute abnormalities. We may have been a grief-stricken lot, but we weren't going to be a silent one: We wanted to be seen, to be acknowledged, to mark these events that didn't exactly make us mothers, but made us . . . something. And so, we were willfully conspicuous, overly loud. Because we knew: No one wants to hear about your dead baby.

Elizabeth McCracken knows that, too. That's why, in her lovely, crystalline meditation on the nature of grief, motherhood, marriage and France -- a memoir occasioned by the stillbirth of her first son -- she opens with a quip: "Once upon a time, before I knew anything about the subject, a woman told me that I should write a book about the lighter side of losing a child." See, she seems to be saying, this won't be so bad. What's more, she reassures us, a healthy infant lies on her lap as she writes.

I hope those signposts are enough to ameliorate readers' aversion to the subject matter, the excuse that the book isn't for them unless they, too, have borne a dead child. After all, you don't have to be an alcoholic to love Caroline Knapp's "Drinking: A Love Story." Nor do you have to have lost your jaw to cancer to appreciate Lucy Grealy's "Autobiography of a Face." The best memoirs transcend their particulars, offer a fresh look at the bumpy terrain of sorrow, love, youthful folly, aged folly, resilience and selfhood. McCracken's is one of those, and it would be a shame to pass it by because it strikes at one's deepest fears.

The dead baby has a name, by the way: He is Pudding, one of those goofy place-holders you give a fetus after seeing its inscrutable shadow on an ultrasound screen. McCracken, author of the wonderfully weird novel "The Giant's House," tells his story, and hers, with heart and wit, but amazingly little self-pity. Like any woman who loses a child -- say, to a random comet that drops from the sky -- she strafes herself with self-blame. Our bodies, ourselves, our fault, right? Eventually, she displaces that recrimination onto the entire country of France, where she and her husband, Edward, led a classic boho writer's life before Pudding's death. Understandably, she swears she'll never go back. I imagine she will even shun French dressing, french fries, French braids. It seems a reasonable and healthy choice. More

Stillborn baby given proper funeral service by area pastor

Stillborn baby given proper funeral service by area pastor
By ANNYSA JOHNSON
Posted: Aug. 19, 2008

The Rev. Debra Trakel of St. James Episcopal Church prayed for his eternal life, and a dozen strangers mourned him.

Then Bernie Schroedl, owner of Good Hope Cemetery at S. 46th St. and W. Cold Spring Road, lifted the tiny white box in which Michael’s body lay and placed it in the earth.

Michael Gabriel was born still on July 4 and left unclaimed at a local hospital. As such, he is consigned to a pauper’s grave. But Trakel and the members of two area churches made sure he did not go there alone.

“We come together as a community to claim this child for God,” said Trakel, who has volunteered her prayers at 66 funerals for those abandoned or forgotten in Milwaukee County over the last four years.

Tuesday’s was her first service for a child.

“No one should be buried alone,” she said.

Trakel began her funeral ministry in 2004 after reading a newspaper article about a homeless man who died of exposure in a parked van.

Her own church ministers to the homeless, feeding as many as 300 people a day, she said. But she realized that she’d never pondered the question: What happens to them when they die?
What happens, she said, is that the county arranges for their burial, but no service. In most cases, family or friends come forward to remember their dead. But there are always those who have no one.

It is for them that Trakel gathers, with members of St. James in Milwaukee and Trinity Episcopal Church in Wauwatosa, to pray at the graveside.

They gathered Tuesday around the tiny white box adorned with a single stem of black-eyed Susans. Many of the people wept as Trakel reflected on this life unlived. He had no legal name, but they called him Michael Gabriel, from the Hebrew words for “who is like God” and “man of God.”

“This child, the perfect innocent, is with God,” Trakel said. “Where else could he possibly be?”
Joanne Oliver of Trinity, who buried her own newborn son 27 years ago, struggled through tears to recite the Episcopal Prayer at the burial of a child.

Schroedl lifted the box into the grave and, on his knees, shoveled the dirt inside.

Michael Gabriel’s name will be inscribed in a plaque at St. James Church, 833 W. Wisconsin Ave., along with all the other indigent Milwaukee residents whose funerals Trakel has presided over.
Trakel knows there are people who will judge this child’s mother, but she will not.

“My belief is there is a mother out there who is grieving, who for some reason — whether emotional or financial — couldn’t handle the burial of this child,” Trakel said.

“My hope is that she knows her child was buried well, by people who shed tears for him, people for whom his birth and death mattered.”