
Lou had met Jean at the Derby Sands Christmas service in December when Jean told Lou she had lost her baby in 1969 and had never really been able to talk about it. They have since become friends. Sheena has been working as a bereavement midwife for a long time.
They were asked to be interviewed on the Sally Pepper show for an hour. The main focus of the talk was to look at a new memorial that Lou and Derby Sands are setting up in Derby. This will be very helpful for people like Jean that don’t have a grave for their baby and will help a lot of parents that lost their babies many years ago. It was a great interview, looking at how different it used to be in the fifties and sixties when stillborn babies were just whisked away. Jean said she never even got a glance at her baby or knew if it was a boy or a girl, until many years later.
Sally Pepper led a fantastic interview, with genuine empathy and made the point clearly how important it is for this subject to be looked at, for people to be able to talk about their babies, and how the right after care and facilities like memory boxes and a proper burial or cremation help a parent to heal.
Lou and Sheena have been working with parents who lost babies years ago to try and track down what happened to them, and where they might be buried in mass graves. They are then able to have a plaque with their babies name in the cemetery near their babies. The new memorial will contain these babies names.
It was the great that the BBC gave a full hour of air time to look at this, and it was very sensitively handled by their team. Well done to Lou, Jean and Sheena and big thanks to Sally Pepper for a really good interview.
Our crew for the day was a one man band due to budget restrictions and prior commitments. But Leon Lockley did a fantastic job of filming and recording this event.
To listen again to the interview on BBC i player (next few days only) you can listen here (Fast forward to 01:13:43 where the interview begins):
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01rqn2z
To find out more about the new Derby Sands memorial see their website here:
http://www.derbysands.org.uk/69-in_the_news.htm
We wish them the best of luck with this and hope that the new memorial brings a lot of comfort to bereaved parents.