Sorry, there is no heartbeat
First the abyss, then the challenge: to continue living after perinatal bereavement.
We would like to welcome our participant to you who are reading us for the first time.
If you have lost a child during pregnancy or after its birth, from any cause, and you are grieving, our embrace comes to you, as a sign of respect and sharing.
We introduce you in this article to the CiaoLapo association, what its mission is and what its activities are for perinatal bereavement support: We hope you will find here valuable tools for your own processing journey.
We were also told, many years ago, “
I’m sorry, there is no pulse
“.
HelloLapo was born four weeks after that sentence.
Straight from the abyss, where we had fallen.
The challenge was clear to us right away. It was pain, but it was also fear: it was so much, so much disbelief, and it was anger. But mostly it was loneliness. We looked like two aliens.
“What do we do with all this pain? I do not want it“I said to myself.
“What do we do with all this love, which I don’t know how to express because he is not there?” I murmured, incredulous. Desperate, empty, demanding, at times.
No one understood.“You already have a child.” They said.
The days went by like this. Love and pain, whipped together, and in between us, alone.
The challenge, for a long time, has been trying not to succumb.
Don’t succumb to grief.
Don’t succumb to the loneliness of ignored and denied grief.
Do not succumb to superficial ignorance and taboo. Seek help. Even offer it one day. Perhaps.
We needed help. Nobody knew how.
Nobody thought that a mother who had been robbed of her child needed help. Nor did they think that a father, or a brother, might need help.
We took up the challenge, at times reckless, always determined and stubborn, often walking on our elbows, as we say in our neck of the woods.
We looked for a way, to go through grief without going crazy.
There seemed to be no roads already mapped out, and the ones that were there were not for us. So, we created a road for ourselves, step by step. By walking and stumbling, and charting paths, we have learned a most important lesson, and it is this lesson that we want to share with allə people facing bereavement during pregnancy or in the year after childbirth.
After the abyss that opens up beneath our feet when someone says,“I’m sorry there’s no pulse,” it’s up to us to figure out how to begin to grieve. No one can do it for us, and we cannot not do it. Coping with grief is the challenge to be taken up willy-nilly.
We realized that this challenge can be taken up and the grief traversed-it is easier if there are tools available.
CiaoLapo was born from this experience, and from a great desire: we wish that every woman, every man affected by perinatal bereavement be helped to take up the challenge, to cope with his loss, and to find his own tools to go through grief.
We believe that it would have been a great help to us back in 2006 to have some good tools available to us to deal more confidently with the challenge of perinatal grief and its traversal.
And so, with CiaoLapo, we thought we would provide a basic toolkit, for all people dealing with the loss of their desired child, for their family members and friends. We also planned to make basic instrumentation available to health care providers to provide respectful and satisfactory care to all bereaved women/couples.
These are the tools that CiaoLapo provides for allə to go through perinatal grief:
the
blog
,
the forum,
Theassociation, which carries out various advocacy and outreach activities
The foundation, which promotes research and training activities
My husband and I are two bereaved parents, but we are also researchers and health professionals and have been studying perinatal grief in all its complex facets for many years.We have been able to experience firsthand the importance of a Careful and respectful support of perinatal bereavement, by health professionals, family members, friends and society. We have seen what happens when support is there and also what happens when no support is available. That is why we promote our instrumentarium, affordable to all and sundry.
“An entire village is needed to mourn” (C. Ravaldi, 2015)
We firmly believe in the mission of CiaoLapo, which has been and continues to be for thousands of people each year an accessible and resourceful toolkit for facilitating perinatal grief. Each person has his or her own time for begin to grieve, just as each person has different ways of going through it. Many parents find it very comforting to read and write from the first days after the death of their child, while many others need a few weeks or months. There are people who come even after years, finally ready to take care of this part of their lives. It is never too late to deal with grief. Every person is welcome when they come to CiaoLapo to reflect on their experience of loss.
For many people, it is important simply to know that there is a place for information about the perinatal loss experience and the experience of processing loss. Taking your time to orient yourself and to choose what tools to use is very important.
CiaoLapo is a place / non-place where the parents, relatives and “friends” of meteor children meet, virtually and if they wish, also in person, to share their experiences of prenatal and perinatal bereavement. By reading the stories of others, sharing the pain and all the nuances of perinatal bereavement, the process of elaboration is lighter and the strengths to regain a decent level of serenity and confidence in the future are greater. Attending CiaoLapo, respecting your times, and your ways of reacting, can help you “see” beyond “grief in perspective, and, even if at first it may seem impossible, it can provide you with some small tools to deal with the pain heavy loss and rebuild your life again.
CiaoLapo is, finally, a very dynamic community, attended each year by hundreds of new parents and caregivers who take turns with each other. Like any community, CiaoLapo also has its rules: respect for one’s own and others’ pain, non-judgmental listening, clarity of purpose, intellectual honesty and confidentiality of what is written or shared in groups and during meetings.
For more information read the other FAQs
