Jules Millward
Cardiff mum Philippa Atkins lost her baby daughter Luna shortly after bringing her home from hospital. Luna’s big sister, Skye, had been able to meet, hold and know her baby sister – and the following day Philippa faced the unimaginable task of explaining to Skye that Luna had died.
The loss devastated the family, but it also inspired Philippa to help families talk about baby loss, death, grief, love and remembrance, which became Skye & Luna, a beautifully illustrated children’s book to help families navigate the difficult conversations around baby loss.
It has since grown into Luna’s Light CIC, which is now working with children, families and schools to develop what we describe as grief literacy – giving children age-appropriate language and emotional tools to understand death and loss before they desperately need them.
Philippa said that baby loss is such a taboo in our society and that she wants to support the next generation to become more “grief literate.”
“We tend to learn about grief after the fact, grief and death and dying is something that we are all going to experience, and it can happen at any age, and having the tools and understanding of what grief is likely to or can or might feel like is really important.”
Pregnancy and infant loss affect many families across Wales each year, often behind closed doors. While support is available, there is still a need for more resources to help children understand when a baby they were expecting, or a baby within their family is no longer there.
A key moment after Philippa lost Luna was the realisation that one of the few things that could feel worse would be watching her child go through the same pain.
She said that children “need to be able to ask questions”, but when adults don’t have an answer, we tend to avoid difficult conversations. Philippa believes that isn’t the way forward.
“How do we raise a generation that can look difficult conversations in the eye and can face them, how do we give children better skills than we have as adults tend to have, how can we teach them to be curious, to never stop asking those questions and to not be afraid of the difficult conversations.”
She wants her own children to know, no matter how overwhelming their grief is, that they have a choice about how to remember and honour a baby they have lost.
“If either of my children go through [baby loss], they will know how to deal with it.
“That doesn’t mean it will be easy, that doesn’t mean it won’t be the worst experience of their life but they will at least be armed with the knowledge that they have a choice and they can choose to remember and honour that baby.
“They do not have to say goodbye to it, that baby does not have to disappear from their family.”
Luna’s Light CIC wants to change the way we think about grief education for children — moving beyond supporting children only once a bereavement has happened and instead helping all children develop an understanding of loss, death and the big feelings that accompany them.
“We teach children about their bodies, relationships, emotions and how to keep themselves safe. Yet death is something that will eventually touch every one of our lives, and still, we can be incredibly uncomfortable talking to children about it.
“We can’t protect our children from ever experiencing grief. But perhaps we can prepare them better for it.”
Luna’s Light CIC is now developing creative, age-appropriate programmes designed to help children explore emotions, loss and grief in a safe environment.
The aim is not to frighten children or introduce them unnecessarily to adult worries. It is to give them an emotional vocabulary and understanding they can carry with them throughout their lives. The organisation believes grief literacy should form part of children’s emotional education, helping build understanding and emotional resilience before a crisis occurs.
Philippa wants to remind people that there is power in telling someone they have experience a miscarriage, still birth or that their baby died.
She added: “As a society we have a huge amount of work to do to get people talking about it” and stressed that if someone was having surgery, they would tell people, and that it shouldn’t be any different when you lose a baby.
Philippa wants people to use Baby Loss Awareness Week to say the name of the baby they lost, or if there is a symbol they connect to that baby, to just remember them.
She added: Your baby was real and your baby matters.”
You can buy Skye & Luna in both Welsh and English here, and follow Lunas Light CIC on Instagram. The organisation is also putting all donations from their crowdfunder received during Baby Loss Awareness Week towards books for Neonatal Outreach at Glangwili General Hospital, Carmarthen.
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