About a year after my son died, I met a woman named Jasmin Herchack in an online support group. She was also local to Saskatoon and she had lost her daughter, Jael, a few months before Marlow was born.
I don't know how many of you in the room are parents, but especially if you're the person who gives birth, there's a biological change. We are evolutionarily programmed to take care of this new life. Our bodies don't understand that they're gone. After Marlow was born, that energy that I should have been putting into raising him needed an outlet, so I did a fundraiser for our children's hospital and that's how we connected.
She was raising money for a CuddleCot, which is a cooling device. I mentioned my son's cold head because keeping their bodies cool allows us to spend some time with them without the decomposition process, to be frank. It just slows that process down.
We started with that. Empty Arms is the organization that we ended up starting. It's been running in Saskatoon since 2015. In our first year, we served seven families. Last year, I think it was well over 100; I don't remember. It's over 100 families every year just in labour and delivery. We do occasionally help pediatric families. We do things like help families make handprints and footprints. I did photography. I stepped away a couple of years ago for personal reasons. I had another loss and it just became overwhelming.
Watching families go through this.... It's amazing because I didn't think I could be.... You think that you're prepared for it after seeing it so many times, but explaining to families the process of picking up their child's ashes or getting a hold of their death certificate.... These are the things that, when you leave the hospital, nobody tells you how to do. Thankfully, now in Saskatoon there are resources for those families. Not every city has that. It's a lot of red tape.
I was speaking to Gabriel outside before about that morning when my daughter wanted to go to the park. It's amazing to just get up the energy to want to get out of bed, so tracking down a death certificate, sending it to the right department, being told that department didn't get it and it must be somewhere else, and then having to send it again....