I don't know whether you have come across the term street crossers this is
the term that's used to describe somebody who when they're walking down
the street and they come across a friend or someone that they know who's
experienced a traumatic experience so for example a bereavement or that kind
of thing they really really don't know what to say they don't know how to
interact with them so in order to avoid the conversation they cross over the
street to avoid the embarrassing conversation this term came up in a
study that we've been conducting looking at the experiences of people who have
had a miscarriage or stillbirth or have had to have a termination
following a diagnosis, a fetal abnormality and in our study we've been
looking at the experiences of these people men and women and the kinds of
the state of mind that you get into when this has happened to you how you might
go about organizing the funeral what kind of experiences you go through and
perhaps most importantly how people communicate with you or in a lot of
cases don't communicate with you this week is Baby Loss Awareness Week so it's
a good time to be thinking about the experiences of people who've who've been
through a pregnancy loss it's not an uncommon occurrence so one in eight
pregnancies in the UK will end in a miscarriage and one in 200 approximately
will end in inner stillbirth so it happens to a lot of people we probably
all know someone who's been through this even though we may not know that we know
them and one of the things to think about is how to communicate with people
so as I was saying before a lot of people that we spoke to
said that they had friends or family who were just avoid talking to them about
the the loss altogether because they were too embarrassed and for many of the
people we spoke to this was absolutely the worst thing because they want to
validate their baby they want to talk about their baby they the baby has a
name they want people to use the baby's name and they found this kind of silence
one of the hardest things to deal with following the loss which is
already extremely hard one of the things that we encountered was a range of
ways in which people talked about the experience that people use but sometimes
use the term pregnancy loss others absolutely hated that term because they
would say well I'll lose my purse I'll lose my keys how could I possibly lose
my baby so for them the word loss was not appropriate
others would talk about I lost my baby and others simply talked about my
pregnancy and so I think one of the key things to take away from this is to
listen to the language that people who have experienced the loss used
themselves and to mirror that language when talking back to them about what
they've been through but above all to give them an opportunity to talk about it
if they want to if they clearly don't want to talk about it then then don't
keep pushing obviously but I think the main voice that we heard was that people
actually do want to articulate their feelings so a little bit about how
people do feel when they've been through the experience of pregnancy loss in our
research we interviewed 35 people who've been through this experience and there
were although there was a lot of variety in there in the way they experienced the
loss and the way they articulated this experience there were quite a few common
threads that ran through what a lot of people were saying so one of the things
is that a number of people felt that particularly the women felt a kind of
separation between themselves and their bodies so they would talk about their
bodies were not able to cope with the baby they would then sometimes blame
their bodies for what had happened so my body my body was not able to do to deal
with the pregnancy or my body expelled the baby and that was quite difficult
for a lot of people we noticed interesting reactions to the experience
of time so one of the things that we were looking for in English when people
talk about time they often talk about time in terms of motions so we're kind
of moving through time so the future will be in front so might be looking
forward to tomorrow or the past might be behind so like thinking about what
happened or looking back in anger another way of talking about time in
English is that you're standing still and
time is kind of washing over you so Christmas is coming up or more often
like the exams are approaching quickly so here kind of time is kind of washing
over you and we were expecting to see more instances of this second way of
talking about time because it it shows a kind of lack of agency so it shows that
you can if I kind of are just here and things are happening to you but in fact what we
found much more often in the people we spoke to was that they see time as
something that's going round and round over here and here they are kind of
sitting outside the timeline doing something which is kind of that they're
not part of the world in a way and they kind of come back into the world
gradually in their own time and as they're prepared to so it's a kind of
like an interesting state of mind it's a kind of another world
that people enter following the experience of pregnancy loss and if
you've got if you know someone who's been through it then trying to kind of
enter their world with them and coping with or being tolerant of some of
the ways of thinking that may seem a little bit odd that accompany this kind
of grief so one of the things that we found was very common was that a lot of
the parents talked about their child as if they were very much
still alive so one mother said that she wants to
show her baby the stars another one wanted to show her son his room even
though he would he was dead she still wants to physically take the baby and
show him these things we have another very touching incident where one of the
fathers had always wanted to look forward to having the 18th birthday
celebratory drink with his son and obviously that wasn't possible but in a
way it was possible because the midwives facilitated that and so they said to him
you can go and have a beer with your son in the room in the hospital and he did
that he sat and he spent some time with his son talking to him getting to know
him in a way the before the funeral
and so a lot of our parents would say things like they would have to create a
lifetime's worth of memories in the space of like one or two weeks which can
be difficult but these memories are really important because
that's what people have to live with after the baby's been buried and so you
may notice that I'm I'm actually in a funeral directors
here because one of the things that we we were interested in was how do people
who've experienced a pregnancy loss feel about the idea of having to organize a
funeral we had one person who commented well she said people are asking about
coffins I didn't want to think about coffee and I wanted him in a cot not a
coffin so you've got to you've got to get from one mindset where one minute
you're going to be you're going to be having a baby you're taking the baby
home you're expecting to be looking after the baby but if the baby is still
born and then the next minute or the next day you're talking about organizing
the funeral and this could be very hard for people and a lot of them said that
in the hospital they felt that they needed a bit more time to get used
to the idea that they'd had a stillborn baby before they started to think about
the funeral they felt in some cases a little bit rushed into making these
decisions we also found quite a lot of variety
across the country in terms of the amount of information that was provided
to people about the kind of funeral that they can have when they have a
stillborn baby there's a lot of variation in that in the kind of funeral
that you can have people often assume that you have to have that the
very very traditional funeral with the big hearse and the baby in the
coffin etc whereas in fact you can do a lot of different things you can carry
the baby with you you can in some cases you can bury the baby in land that is that
is that is personal for you rather than in a than in a
cemetery there's a lot of different things you can do there's a lot of
choice and the funeral directors that I'm in here is one that
specializes in making these kind of choices available to people so I hope
this video has been helpful to you and interesting if you'd like to
find out any more about our project and the language that people use when
talking about the experience of pregnancy loss and also the language
that people use when talking to them about their loss our project is
available online – The Death Before Birth project and I'd like
to thank you for listening