A woman showed up early for a new grief group that was to deal with the death of a child. The group was meeting at a funeral home and the woman was in her seventies so everyone assumed she was there to pay her respects to one of the people lying in state. Finally the group leader asked her if he could help and she asked if this was the where the group on children’s death was to meet. When told it was the place she said, “I don’t know whether or not I qualify, it happened so long ago.” They went to the meeting room, and since it was early she had time to tell her story. 

“Fifty years ago I had a stillborn son. His name is Tommy. No one even knows he has a name, but I named him Tommy. As soon as he was born, my husband took his body and he was buried. When my husband returned he said that was over and done with and he did not want to hear any more about it. For fifty years I have watched other children grow and wondered what Tommy would look like. For fifty years I have wanted to talk, but no one would allow me to do so. Now at last I can talk about Tommy.”

The leader happened to be a Catholic Deacon so he led her in a memorial for Tommy, fifty years late.

Grief doesn’t go away, no matter how hard we try to forget no matter how we try to hide it from others. Grief never goes away until it is grieved. 

A funeral director in New Zealand purchased a lot in a cemetery and placed a large stone there. The inscription simply read “For all the unnamed children.” This was placed quietly, done without publicity, but there is a constant supply of flowers, toys and remembrances left there. 

A funeral director in Canada took me to see two rather remarkable things in the cemetery there. He too, had placed a large marker dedicated to children who were not remembered anywhere else. He offered to carve the names on the stone. The first request came from a seventy-five year old man who told of a stillbirth that had never been memorialized in any way. His wife was gone and he looked back with regret that he did not do something to help relieve her grief and honor the life of his son. 

The large stone filled with names on both sides. The funeral home has added two additional ones and turned the area into a small park where people can sit and remember long lost loves.

That same funeral director showed me a statue of a small boy standing on top of a marker and told me a most remarkable story. The small boy had been run over by a doctor’s car back in the twenties. The doctor had the statue cast and placed at the gravesite. Over the years the weather and vandals did great damage to the statue. The funeral director remembers seeing the statue there most of his life and was fascinated by the story. The condition bothered him so much that he asked a sculptor to redo the statue, this time in bronze, so it would last much longer. Here is where the story gets remarkable.

When the statue was completed the funeral director decided to have a small ceremony of dedication. A short time before the dedication was to happen a funeral director from another city called him to say that a family had dropped by his funeral home working on their genealogies and were looking for families in that area with a certain name, the same name as the little boy in the statue. When they heard the story they immediately drove to meet with the funeral director. They asked him to delay the dedication until they could contact other members of their family to see if they would like to participate. Several members drove or flew many miles to rededicate a statue to a life none of them knew except through family stories. Most of them did not know there was a statue memorializing the life. They came because they recognized the value of remembrance and honoring the dead. 

We don’t have to go to New Zealand or Canada to see this value played out right before our eyes. The baby section of almost any cemetery is a constantly changing array of toys, balloons, little dolls and stuffed bears as families find a sense of being connected to lives they know more than anyone could ever guess. Lives they want to be sure are remembered. 

Even after all of these years we still tend to play down the importance of ritual and memorializing stillborn children. It is still looked upon as “minor grief” and too many mothers are told they should not weep because they did not know the baby long enough to grow attached, or some other meaningless statement spoken to stifle the natural and needed process of grieving. The world moves on and another parent is left to remember in silence what they want shouted from the housetops. No one is dead until they are forgotten. Hallowing some place where they will never be forgotten makes a simple plot of ground into a holy place.

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