'We still live it'
A grieving mother hopes to offer comfort in numbers
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Cara Tyrrell of Proctorsville, near Ludlow, holds a prototype of the "memory box" that she and her husband plan to give to area parents who have lost a child. She is also starting a local chapter of a national support group to help fellow bereaved parents. The couple's daughter Emma was stillborn in 2000. The box is designed so it can hold a photo in the lid. Albert J. Marro |
Toolbox
By Josh O'Gorman
Staff Writer - Published: January 4, 2009
In 2000, Cara Tyrrell was poised on the cusp of joy. Pregnant with her first child, she and her husband, Jeremiah, were ready to open their hearts and expand their family by one. Instead, they were struck by tragedy.
On Sept. 8, 2000, the Tyrrells' daughter Emma was stillborn at full term. For eight years, the Proctorsville couple have dealt with their grief, and this month they will begin to help others.
Cara Tyrrell, now 32, is starting a southern Vermont chapter of Share, a national nonprofit organization dedicated to helping families deal with the emotional pain of miscarriage or infant death. The first meeting will be Jan. 14.
While her and her husband's grief and healing continue, Tyrrell says she felt a "shift" on the eighth anniversary of Emma's death that motivated her to start a local Share chapter.
"I felt now was the time to share this with the world, because there's a huge community need," she says. "This is a labor of love. We lived it and we still live it. Grief is something that morphs and permeates your life, but it never disappears."
Vermont has only one existing Share chapter, based in Burlington. The next closest are in Manchester, N.H., and Northampton, Mass., although the organization has 86 chapters nationwide and others in Canada and England.
Carol McMurrich, 32, of Westhampton, Mass., started the Northampton Share chapter in 2007. McMurrich and her husband's first child was stillborn in May 2003, and the couple soon began attending Share meetings in Springfield, Mass., but were looking for more support than was offered by a two-hour meeting once a month.
Today, McMurrich's Share chapter collaborates with Cooley Dickinson Hospital in Northampton to offer counseling to parents just after the death of a child."What was important to me in starting a group was to make a resource that is available at all times," she says.
McMurrich also meets with doctors and nurses to encourage them to be more sensitive to patients' feelings of loss.
"None of the bad stories we hear (about insensitive treatment) are out of malice," she says. "A lot of health care providers are almost trained out of being emotional caregivers, and we're trying to retrain them."
While years might pass, grief will remain with a person, McMurrich says.
"We have people in their 70s who experienced loss 45 years ago. They never forget."
Tyrrell is hoping to create a similarly supportive community in Vermont. After Emma's death, she found herself visiting and posting to Internet message boards, such as stirrup-queens.blogspot.com, which has drawn more than 1,500 women in different stages of loss or dealing with infertility, but she was still searching for people in her area.
More recently, with the wisdom of experience, she turned to the Web to offer help to local families that had _lost a child.
"As I was reaching out, I had people reaching back from Australia ...," she says. "There was a lack of face-to-face contact. Locally, I feel disconnected from the people who need me most."
She thought of starting a support group in the area, and this fall wrote about the idea on her blog at buildingheavenlybridges.blogspot.com. One of her readers wrote to tell her about Share, which turned out to be exactly what Tyrrell was looking for. "I read about them, I realized there was no need to reinvent the wheel," she says.
To start, the monthly meetings will be led by other bereaved parents, but as Tyrrell gets to know the parents, she plans to bring in professionals to address their specific medical and emotional issues.
In addition to counseling, the Tyrrells are going to offer something tangible for grieving parents to hold onto. Jeremiah is a craftsman and has created what Cara calls a memory box, a wooden box in which parents can store mementos to remind them of their child.
Jeremiah will make the first 20 boxes before turning the project over to the industrial arts students at Green Mountain Union High School in Chester.
"In a way, this might prepare them, because chances are one of these boys and girls will be touched by this later in life," Cara says.
The Tyrrells did not let Emma's death destroy their hopes for a family. They have two daughters - Claire, 6, and Caroline, 4. Cara says she was anxious as she carried Claire, fearful she might lose another daughter.
"That pregnancy after a loss is awesome - awesome in its biggest sense - because you find yourself reacting to every symptom," she recalls. "After we did deliver Claire, healthy and screaming, two years later when I was pregnant with Caroline I was calm."
Tyrrell says her group will also give support to parents as they think about having another child.
While Emma is not in their household, she is a member of the family, Tyrrell says. Her daughters think of Emma as a sister.
"One of the most important things was including Emma in a healthy way, so they've grown up knowing about her without being overshadowed by her," Tyrrell says. "If you ask them how many children are in their family, they say three."
In addition to starting a Share group, Tyrrell maintains her Web site as a resource for grieving parents. She is also completing a book that she hopes to publish, "After Emma: One Mother's Journey of Self-Discovery Through the Loss of Her Baby." It is both a memoir and a self-help guide for bereaved parents.
"Even though people might have gone through the same experience physically, their emotional experiences and responses are going to be totally different," Tyrrell says. "I want people to know that however they need support, that's what we'll do."
Contact Josh O'Gorman at josh.ogorman@rutlandherald.com.