“The darkest day of our lives was filled with light. We have all the pain, but all the love we have experienced overcomes it. This is the memory of Andrés Morgenstern, head of pediatric palliative care at Vall d'Hebron, a year and a half after suffering a tragedy. His wife, Mireia, a neonatal pediatrician at the same hospital, unexpectedly lost the child she was expecting, her first, at 36 weeks pregnant.
"It is a phase of shock, your whole life, your projects, your dreams are broken," recalls the father, and vindicates the memory of Aran and the professional support that the family received. Vall d'Hebron, the only hospital in the country that has a support plan for perinatal loss with a part plan adapted to families, has just updated this protocol.
The document addresses the loss regardless of the week of the mother's gestation, focuses on the keys to managing memory and mourning by the parents and offers the necessary tools to professionals, according to Vanessa Bueno, obstetrics supervisor at Vall d'Hebron. These are not exceptional situations. This center attended to some 170 situations of pregnancy loss last year, and in Spain 1,440 families lost a child in 2021 during pregnancy, childbirth or in the days after.
The WHO places the perinatal period between 22 weeks of gestation and one week after birth. But according to the experience of Vall d'Hebron, there is no correlation between the intensity of mourning and the time of pregnancy or the degree of contact with the newborn. For this reason, the hospital protocol provides for follow-up from the moment of conception.
Through observation and a questionnaire to parents about existing options, professionals determine how they want to say goodbye to their child or experience the grieving process.
“Everything that the parents had thought would happen disappears, with the aggravating factor that this drama is often made invisible by the environment and the loss tends to be minimized because it is not tangible. Women lack social legitimacy and grieve in silence, when they tell us that it is a loss as dramatic as any other," Bueno points out.
Despite his experience, Dr. Morgernstern stresses that no one is prepared for a perinatal loss. "Each family is different, but what is clear to me is that for families that have not made it visible in their environment or have not felt accompanied by the hospital environment, grief is more traumatic," he says.
In the case of Aran, his parents decided not to forget: “Many things you will not be able to do, you will not be able to see his smile, but you have been able to hold him in your arms, touch his hands. We dressed him, we told the family to come meet him and say goodbye. They took pictures of us, we fingerprinted him, we kept a lock of hair. He has been part of the family and he will be forever. We will talk about him to his little brother because he has been very important to us ”.
