Chaplain's Corner

As you and I brought in the New Year with celebration, millions around the world saw in the New Year in a much more sober mood. 2016 was a brutal year in many ways, war, refugees, battles with cancer and many other life ending, life diminishing diseases. 2016 brought the reality of Medically Assisted Death in Canada. This reality raises the fear this development will lead eventually to a Belgium like euthanasia environment. Yet as anxious as some are to end their life, millions more hold dearly to life and morn deeply when it is ripped from their arms.

Recently I received an email from a friend from High school. Besides Christmas Cards and one visit two summers ago when he was in Winnipeg for business we haven’t spent time together. His life took him to the southern states and mine to Canada. You know how life is. The email was about the death of his only grandson. His family is devastated, I was brokenhearted.

In my work I am called on from time to time to care for families at the time of their child’s death. It is one of the more difficult situations I am called into. We in North America are somewhat insulated from infant death. Statistics about infant death in Canada report that 4.6 infant deaths occur for every 1000 births. Our neighbor to the south reports 5.8 infant deaths per 1000 births. The lowest is in Monaco where the rate is 1.8 infant deaths per 1000 births and the highest is Afghanistan where 112.8 infant death occur for every 1000 births.

The fact is babies die. But every fact takes on a monumental change when the death becomes personal: “our baby died.” When the death of a baby moves from the abstract to the personal everything changes. I may not even feel sadness when confronted with the death rate of babies in Afghanistan, but if a baby in my family circle dies, I am devastated in ways I never imagined I could be.

In many places in the world, there is no support at all for families that experience this kind of death. Even here in Canada support is spotty and depends to a large extent on what kind of supports a family has in their life before the loss occurs. But often, even when a family has good supports prior to the loss, those supports fail when a baby dies because this is such a hard reality to grapple with and many friends feel their inadequacy so deeply they are crippled by it and end up abandoning the ones experiencing the death in their hour of need.

This is about to change in the Steinbach area. A few years ago a woman in our community experienced the death of her third child. It was devastating, healing was slow and took time but out of that tragic loss, a passion grew. A passion to provide support for other women, other families who have experienced the same loss. Supported by her husband and others she went to the States and received training to begin a “SHARE: pregnancy and infant loss” support group in our area. I have met with her, read the material and done what I can to get the word out in our community that this is now available.

SHARE’s goal is to give emotional, physical, spiritual and social healing to families that experience the loss of child during pregnancy or soon after birth. Beginning Thursday, January 5th, a Share support group will meet at the Jake Epp Library, the first Thursday of every month at 7:00 p.m. If you are interested or have questions about this group, please call Candace Loewen at 204-381-2229. SHARE also provides a variety of ways to support a family, such as one on one/phone support, resource packets, and private online communities.