‘Your baby has died,’ the nurse told me. The hospital hadn’t a clue what to do next

The waiter approached our table with two glasses of prosecco. “Is it a birthday or an anniversary?” he asked. “Neither,” I replied, “just a very special occasion.”

It was indeed a special occasion, a day a long time coming – 39 years.

Just a short half-hour before this we had left the office of the registrar of births, marriages and deaths in Dublin and walked up to the Merrion Hotel for a lunch to celebrate what we had just done: registered the stillbirth of our baby daughter, Susan, on May 13th, 1983. Back in the 1980s, registration of stillbirths was not possible; they were seen as nonevents.

The girl in the registrar’s office was very nice, a real Dub. “Ah, that’s so sad,” she said, and she really meant it. “All those years ago, but it’s still so sad – and a little girl…”

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The forms were filled in and our identification and confirmation of the event from the hospital were produced; this all took 10 minutes, but it took a further 45 to find a printer that would print this precious document that we had waited nearly 40 years for.

Technical assistance had to be sought to find a printer that would do the job. After a few false starts, a printer somewhere eventually started to hum, sprang to life, and delivered a certificate to say that our baby, Susan, had been stillborn all those years ago.

And so the lunch. We sat down at 1pm, and when we left our table, around 6pm, it was only to move from the restaurant to the bar for a couple more drinks before we left for home, at 7.30pm. There was a lot to talk about.

It’s not that we had never talked about it before, but in the early years it was still raw, and we were busy rearing our other children and making a living and everything that goes with all that. Now was the time, 39 years later, to talk it all over properly with excellent food and drink and in a beautiful setting.

I looked at the certificate. I had never known my little girl’s birth weight or her period of gestation. And, now, here they were recorded on the certificate printed out by the HSE printer – the one that worked.

We talked through that awful night: being woken by the phone at 3am. “Come in at once: your wife needs you,” I was told by the nurse. I threw on clothes and rushed to the Coombe hospital with my mind racing – what was it? What was going on?

The nurse who met me was fairly blunt. “Your baby has died,” she told me. “You can see your wife for a little while and then come back in the morning and take her home.”

I never saw our baby; Brenda had, of course, seen her briefly following delivery, but she never got to hold her. Susan was quickly taken away, and we were told that the hospital would take care of everything and that our baby would be buried in Glasnevin. The hospital simply didn’t have a clue how to deal with a situation like this.

Over the following period of time my wife came into contact with other women who had had similar experiences. They exchanged stories and were shocked that there was such ignorance about how these situations should be handled. One conversation led to another and an idea emerged that led to the founding of an organisation – now called Féileacáin – to support women at these times and to campaign for changes in the way maternity hospitals handled them.

After initial resistance from hospital management, the message got through and changes were made. A helpline was set up – our landline was used for a while – to offer support to parents at these times of sadness and grief.

Decades later, when I had left my business career and had become a humanist celebrant, I found myself conducting funeral ceremonies for stillborn babies. I’m always careful on these occasions to acknowledge the hopes and dreams the parents had for their child as well as recognising the life the baby lived in the womb. This recognition is so important – a recognition our little girl was denied.

I suppose you could call it closure of a sort, this lunch all these years later. You never forget: the intensity of the sadness fades but never completely disappears. We removed the simple little stone memorial with the inscription “Susan Whiteside Born & Died 13th May 1983″ from Glasnevin some time ago, and it is now among the potted plants on our balcony. It’s nice to have it close.