This report was written by a student for her thesis.. She came to my house in May of 89, and interviewed me. She gave me the rough draft, and I am now sharing it with You.
"Saturday evening two-month-old Jennifer Johnson cried and flailed her legs. She had her bottle and a bath; she even gurgled and cooed. Early Sunday morning, she died.
No one knows why. No one knows why each year 10,000 otherwise perfectly healthy babies die. All that is known is encompassed in a name that describes the phenomenon - Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.
Sudden death not only of infants; but also of the security, hopes, dreams and lifestyle of parents. It is parents who must be reborn after the death of their child.
'When you have a baby die, the person you were before dies with it. You have to become a whole new person,' Misty Johnson, Jennifer's mother, said. However, the road to a new life is not clearly marked.
'You have to deal with it the best way you can. Don't worry about whether it's wrong or right,' Johnson advised.
Johnson tried to fill her life with a maelstrom of activity to ease the pain and guilt over losing her child. She started returning unopened baby items to department stores two days after Jennifer died. It was difficult to give reasons for the returns. 'When one sales girl asked me for a reson why I was returning a changing pad to write on the receipt, I just looked at her and said, 'my baby died.'"
'I feel bad looking back on it, but I didn't feel bad at the time. I just had to cope,' she said.
Johnson also carried physical memories of Jennifer; her pacifier, her blanket, whenever she went out. She turned to drugs. But nothing seemed to help Johnson go on living and assuage her guilt over Jennifer's death. Nothing until she went to a pshychiatrist and various support groups.
It is at support groups that grief and guilt-ridden parents can ask the "what ifs" and get answers from people who have asked all the same questions.
'When you take responsibility for the life, you take responsibility for the death as well,' said Janet Jackson who founded the Valley-Sierra Chaper of the National Sudden Infant Death Syndrom Foundation after her son died.
'That is the reason SIDS is so painful. Parents have a tremendously hard time accepting that there was nothing they could have done to prevent their baby's death,' she said.
'and nothing parents could do helps more than talking to others who also lost children. Parents might not feel like talking right away, but when they do, we try to be here,'Jackson said.
Besides the Sierra Valley Chapter of the SIDS foundation, other groups that support SIDS parents include Compassionate Friends, and Support After NeoNatal Death, or SANDS.
The members of Compassionate Friends have lost children of all ages, while SANDS supports parents whose babies were stillborn or miscarried.
Johnson said that Compassionate Friends helps her by just being there, while SANDS helps primarily with the emotional aspect of "empty arms," or arms that are not filled with a warm baby.
The insecurity parents feel after the death of their child often is a stumbling block when they consider having another baby. Some parents like Johnson couldn't wait to have another child.
'I wanted another baby right then. I even considered in-vitro fertilization,' Johnson said. Others like Jackson preferred to wait to have another child.
'It took me a while to muster the courage to try again,' she said, 'however, I always knew I needed another baby.'
However, all three women said there would always be lingering uneasiness and an urge to overprotect their subsequent children.
'I feel I was robbed twice,' Jackson said. 'I feel that I will never ever be calm and serene with a baby again. That fuzzy feeling at the nape that says everything's ok has gone.'
Regardless of whether parents need another child to help them to be reborn after SIDS, Jackson said they all need support and compassion from friends and relatives.
'The public could help a lot if they would be there if someone they know loses their baby to SIDS,' she said. 'It helps to be told 'It wasn't' your fault.' In fact it's the first step to coping."
I hope that this hasn't been too long.. but i hope that it has helped even a small bit.
