Quick Review of Helpful Articles
Sometimes getting permissions to reprint articles can be an involved and long process. So rather than try to re-print all these articles, we thought to offer you links to these resources directly. Hope you will click through and find more help and information from around the web.
These articles are from the MISS website.
If you are a nurse or know someone who is a nurse or someone studying
to be a nurse, by all means, lead them by their noses to these two articles!
This first one is "Nursing Perspectives" by Nurses Brenda Whiting
Beard, R.N., B.S.N., and Lousie Ward, R.N., M.S.N., and this is a most
thorough and understand and comprehensive piece. If you are involved with
care for parents at all, you need to read this:
http://www.misschildren.org/pro/articles/nurses.html
The other article is a little more direct and presented in list-format.
This is "Stillbirth Care: How to care for a baby who died in utero,
prior to birth" and is offered, I believe, from Joanne Cacciatore
at MISS. All I can say is that I wish I had had this level of care after
my son died. We had some of it, but not all. And the Case Workers or Social
Workers or whatever you call them, should definitely be versed in this
list as well. Our case worker was just awful-- not an advocate for us
at all, but rather an advocate for keeping her own paperwork in order!
If you are involved in care giving at all, read this:
http://www.misschildren.org/pro/articles/stillbirth.html
This article is from Compassionate Friends. It's a very thorough look
at how grief deeply changes our lives. They offer some great perspectives
for how to manage communicating with a partner who grieves very differently
than you do, for talking to surviving siblings, for making memories. Very
useful, I think:
http://www.compassionatefriends.org/stillbirth.htm
Empty Cradles offers this information about stillbirth. They offer the
idea that stillbirth is not rare, that the real statistics of how many
babies die this way is severly under-reported even though stats have been
collected to give us numbers. They offer many other resources on their
site as well:
http://www.empty-cradles.com/stillbirth.htm
The AGAST website is for and by bereaved grandparents, and there are many wonderful articles available on their website for everyone. In the section called "Grieving" you will find the following articles:
Parents and the grieving process
The grief of children
Grief of grandparents
When a grandchild dies
Understanding mourning: A child has died
Taking care of yourself
There really is something helpful here for anyone: http://www.agast.org
This is just the beginning of the information available on-line. Take a look at these, check out the links sections at each of these sites, and then keep right on surfing. There is so much out there. I will offer one caveat: WebMD. There is another article offered here in the Loss Journal this month about the WebMD site and the unreliable information I found there. So with any website, don't be afraid to ask questions, confirm what you are reading, and be as aware as you can be. Don't just assume it's true because it's on the web. Stick to your gut feelings, ask questions till your heart's content, and keep reaching out to learn more about your own grief and healing process each and every day. That quest for healing will keep us alive.
Miracles to you!
Author Biography
Kara lives and works on Vashon Island and continues to build KotaPress
as a legacy for her son Dakota Jones who died March 11, 1999. Her poetry,
narratives, and non-fiction articles have been published world wide, and
she has begun to teach more and more writing process classes online and
offline. Her Expanding Poetry class is now available online at CourseBridge.com,
and you can register today at http://www.coursebridge.com/html/courses/writing/cbep01.asp
