Cherishing Memories of Babies Who Never Grew Up

Heather Heisey remembers her newborn son clutching her husband’s finger as the infant struggled to breathe before he died, just 20 minutes after birth.

She knew six months into her pregnancy that he had a rare and lethal genetic defect preventing his lungs from developing fully--and that he would die almost as soon as he was born in February 1997.

The Heiseys named him David and buried him near their home in Louisville, Ky. Since then, the couple, who moved to Elizabethtown, Pa., this year, also have suffered two miscarriages.

But it has been difficult to grieve for David because his grave is so far away, and the loss from the miscarriages is intangible, Heather Heisey said. “We had no place to go to visit a grave site. And our other two babies weren’t even there to hold, so we had no place to go to remember,” she said.

Until now.

A $12,000 communal burial site for stillborn babies, miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies was dedicated in September and will be maintained by the Milton S. Hershey Medical Center through private donations. Graveside services will take place quarterly, and each grave will be marked by a gray stone.

A large tear-shaped black stone at the base of a sloping hill is inscribed, “In Loving Memory of Our Children Seen and Unseen . . . Your Parents.”

Couples like the Heiseys say that, although their children are not buried there, having a place to grieve helps bring them peace. They visit, bring flowers and launch balloons on the anniversary of their baby’s death.

“So many people don’t acknowledge this as a true loss. It’s comforting to know there’s . . . an acknowledgment to our loss,” said Molly Houp, who miscarried twins after a two-month pregnancy.

Such burial sites have become common nationwide, said Fran Rybarik, director of Bereavement Services of Gundersen Lutheran Medical Center in La Crosse, Wis.

The Wisconsin bereavement program, which started in 1981, has trained 16,000 health care workers in all 50 states and in eight other countries. It was a model for Hershey’s Infant Loss Support Group, which started this February and includes about 20 couples.

Joni McCrady, a registered nurse who pushed for the burial site and was trained by the Wisconsin group, said that when she joined the Hershey medical staff in 1991, delivery nurses tried to follow up with grieving couples.

But “it was a hit-and-miss thing.” Staff members now follow up with letters and phone calls to couples for a year, she said.

“This program is proactive. We call regardless of whether they join a support group,” she said.

Until now, couples with failed pregnancies had few resources for support, McCrady said.

Fetuses less than 16 weeks old were considered “surgical specimens” and were either cremated or disposed of in a common grave. Couples whose fetuses were older than 16 weeks had the option of a private burial or to allow the hospital to cremate the remains or bury them with bodies that had been donated for medical research.

Under the new program, all remains will be buried at the new grave site. Hershey’s burial program is unusual because it offers the service to couples with stillborn infants, Rybarik said. Most programs elsewhere in the nation are limited to couples with miscarriages or ectopic pregnancies, in which the fetus develops outside the uterus.

Norman Foster, chief of mortician services at Hershey, said that for years couples called him to find out what had become of their stillborn babies or miscarriages. A burial site will help people come to terms with their grief sooner, he said.

Houp said that until she found the support group at Hershey, “I thought I was crazy.”

She said, “It’s really the only place we can go where people truly understand what we’ve been through and are struggling with, because they’ve been there too.”

To contact the Infant Loss Support Group at the Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, call (717) 531-3503.