‘Did she look like me?’ How Lyndsay found the right words after her daughter died

Three-year-old Billy Bourke was playing in the garden when his mother, Lyndsay, came home from the hospital. He looked at her tummy, round and taut days earlier. It was suddenly smaller.

“What did we have? A boy or a girl?” Billy asked.

“I said, ‘A little girl’,” Lyndsay replied. And Billy kept playing.

Bourke was 38 weeks pregnant with her daughter, Summer, when she phoned Manly Hospital in April 2018. “As soon as I said it out loud, that I couldn’t feel her moving, I knew,” she said. “She had slipped away.”

Through the shock and sadness of losing Summer, Bourke thought of Billy. How would she and her husband, Liam, explain this to him after he had been so excited about the pregnancy?

“I knew it wouldn’t be something that he’d just forget,” Bourke said.

An infant-loss counsellor guided their words and actions: be factual and, if you’re feeling sad, be sad.

“Liam and I sat down with Billy, and we told him that his little sister had died,” Bourke said. “It sounds harsh, but it was the right thing to say because it was definite.

“We said, ‘We know you’re excited to be a big brother, and you are a big brother. But your sister is not [coming] home. She is in heaven’.”

Billy had questions: “Did she look like me?” and “Did she look like she was asleep?”

His three-year-old musings brought a lightness to their family’s grief, Bourke said.

“I think about Summer a lot,” Billy once said, voicing something keenly true for all of them, but that his parents didn’t say.

A survey of parents who experienced pregnancy or infant loss by not-for-profit Gidget Australia Foundation found that two in five try to act normally and move on, rather than seeking support or openly processing their grief.

Gidget chief executive Arabella Gibson said there was a growing gap in terms of access to timely, free support for families experiencing infant loss, perinatal depression and anxiety.

Every month for about a year, Bourke saw another counsellor with Gidget as a prophylactic for perinatal anxiety and depression, which affects roughly one in five mothers and one in 10 fathers during pregnancy and the first year of parenthood.

“She was amazing,” Bourke said of her counsellor, who specialised in infant loss.

“We’d just talk, and I was given tools I could bring back home,” Bourke added, recalling a candle family members could light whenever they thought of Summer.

Soon, Liam started seeing the same counsellor. “It’s an untapped resource that men don’t know about,” Bourke said.

About 100,000 people are diagnosed every year with perinatal depression and anxiety in Australia, and many more are undiagnosed.

“The issue we’ve got is that we have universal [perinatal mental health] screening nationally … but we haven’t had the services to match,” Gibson said.

Some Gidget Houses have wait times of four weeks to three months, she said.

The organisation, in partnership with Federation University, developed a graduate diploma in perinatal mental health, offering free supervision at Gidget Houses, to build a specialised workforce.

“We know that if we can get in early, this is a very recoverable illness, and we can change the trajectory of an entire family’s life,” Gibson said. “Rather than letting it become something that can fester as various iterations of mental ill health for generations.”

Billy and his younger brother Beau – born in June 2019 – still talk about Summer and whether she would have sat in the back seat of the car with them, or whether she’d have blonde hair like theirs.

“She’s part of their lives, in a way that’s not heavy with loss,” Bourke said.

Gidget clinical services director Dr Erin Seeto said one challenging through-line for grieving parents was the question: “How many children do you have?”

Those who include their stillborn child can fear the reactions of others and their follow-up questions, Seeto said.

The alternative “can create complex feelings of shame and guilt about what it means to be a mother or father than not acknowledge perinatal loss”, she said.

Seeto said people tend to jump in and help when the loss is most acute in the early days, but parents often say that the hardest time is when the world feels like it has moved on.

“Ask the person what they need, and that can change day by day,” she said. It was also important, she said, to avoid hurtful “at least” statements, such as: “At least you know you can get pregnant”, and “At least you have another child”.

On Gidget Giving Day, June 10, every donation to the foundation will be matched by philanthropic donors, helping twice as many families access its services.

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