Parents attend Coventry Cathedral service to help with baby loss

Grieving parents were able to hear and share their stores at a special service to mark Baby Loss Awareness Week.

Jessica Weeks, who started charity Hannah's House after the death of her daughter Emilia, attended the event.

She said she found it helpful adding one of the biggest issues surrounding baby loss are parents not having any tangible memories of their child.

Rev Ricarda Witcombe, chaplain at George Eliot Hospital, led the service on Sunday at Coventry Cathedral.

Following a 12-week scan in January 2017, Mrs Weeks and her husband found out their unborn child had spina bifida and anencephaly, a defect in which a baby will be born without parts of the brain and skull.

They had less than an hour to hold their daughter on the day of her birth as she died 57 minutes later.

As Mrs Weeks and her family fought through grief, she found there were few charities around to support her first-born child, Hannah, deal with the loss of a sibling.

The concept of Hannah's House, named after her daughter, was born and she set about helping families cope with neonatal death, miscarriage and stillbirth.

"Children don't deal with grief, they don't stay in the sadness for very long so it may appear that they are over things because they start talking about something else, but they will come back to it," she said.

Faith lost her son Grayson when he was stillborn at 37 weeks.

She said it had been "very isolating" to be be unable to talk with other people about her loss and that "events like this that make it that little bit easier".

The national Baby Loss Awareness Week is led by Sands, the stillbirth and neonatal death charity, in collaboration with more than 40 charities across the UK.

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