Company Helps Create Memories for Grieving Parents
Tim Nelson remembers the routine doctor’s visit for his pregnant wife, Monica, due to deliver any day. He remembers the urgent ultrasound. He remembers the words: “I’m sorry. There’s no sign of life.”
In the delivery room, he remembers only silence.
Kathleen Riley Nelson came into the world and left without a sound. She had perfect fingers and a perfect nose but a terribly twisted umbilical cord. Her parents were left to face their grief with only a fading hospital Polaroid.
“I needed to work hard to make something positive come out of what was such a horrible time in my life,” recalls Tim Nelson.
So he volunteered at the Pregnancy and Infant Loss Center in Wayzata, Minn., spoke at conferences and wrote a booklet about grief from a father’s perspective.
He eventually realized that the company he co-owns, deRuyter-Nelson Publications Inc. in St. Paul, could do something more. In 1994, he and his business partner, Calvin deRuyter, formed a division for families handling a crisis in pregnancy or an infant’s death.
They called it A Place to Remember.
It specializes in cards, customized sketches from photographs, coloring books for siblings and ceramic containers for a baby’s ashes.
Its stationery, unlike most at the corner drugstore, includes birth-death announcements, sympathy cards for grieving parents, and announcements for twins when one has died. The for-profit company estimates it sells up to 30,000 of the items per year.
A baby book includes traditional pages for the family tree, footprints and lock of hair. But it also has space to record the baby’s death and include dried flowers or a program from a memorial service.
The company uses high-grade paper and commissions professional artists--touches of quality that send an important message.
“If that baby had lived, you’d be getting their book from Hallmark,” notes Nelson. “It doesn’t need to be off a copy machine. It can be nice.”
About 4,000 hospitals have ordered materials.
“The mementos are tangible evidence that this baby existed,” says Cathi Lammert, executive director of SHARE Pregnancy and Infant Loss Support Inc. of St. Charles, Mo. “It also helps families in their healing process . . . because that’s all they have.”
A nurse, Lammert lost her own son to complications from an Rh blood problem. Christopher died five days after birth in 1982, before many infant-loss resources existed.
The infant mortality rate in the United States has dropped considerably since the early 1900s. Then, an estimated 10% of all babies died before their first birthday. The rate is now less than 1%.
According to 1996 data from the National Center for Health Statistics, 28,419 infants died before their first birthday. About two-thirds of those died within a month of birth. An additional 27,068 babies were either stillborn or died in the second half of pregnancy.
“It’s not morbid. It’s a fact of life,” says Nelson, of A Place to Remember. But he adds: “It’s not that you want to think, oh good, other people are suffering too. But if other people have gone through it and survived, I can too.”
Besides SHARE, other groups across the country, from Centering Corp. in Omaha, Neb., to Perinatal Loss in Portland, Ore., reinforce that message.
The organizations reflect a cultural shift. Until the 1970s, many mothers were heavily sedated during childbirth. Often a hospital would bury or cremate the bodies of infants without any kind of service and without showing the child to the parents.
“People who are in their 50s to 70s have shared with us how wrong that was,” Lammert says. “They still wonder what their baby looked like.”
Today many hospitals encourage parents whose babies die to hold the infants, name them and take photos. Many offer booklets such as “When Hello Means Goodbye.”
“One of our main goals has been to try and encourage people to remember the fact that remembering is not bad,” says Nelson, whose baby died in 1983. “Our society seems to think that somebody is not moving on or not healing if you’re remembering.”
Announcement cards can be particularly helpful, he says, because grieving parents sometimes need help conveying news of the death and the magnitude of their loss.
Dawn Hirt of St. Paul sent remembrance cards in 1998, when her daughter was stillborn.
Then Hirt learned about A Place to Remember. “It validated that life, and that it was OK to celebrate and grieve the loss,” she said.
A memory box now holds Angela’s hospital bracelet and blanket.
“To have all those tangible pieces of her brief visit with us is very, very valuable,” Hirt said. “It’s like touching your child in a way that you couldn’t otherwise.”
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On the Net:
https://www.aplacetoremember.com
https://www.nationalshareoffice.com
