Caring for Babies and Children Who Die

guys I just wanted to talk a little today about doing funerals for babies and children because I've had some questions about that and kind of how I deal with it and if it's the hardest part of my job and just a little overview of kind of that side of the business it is definitely never a great day when you come into work and you find out that you know you're gonna be caring for baby or child's even you know teenagers or children oh I've heard like somebody's child but definitely when they're little and younger it's it's a whole new it's a whole new hurt that you take on in this business I think the biggest challenge with it is the mental that you have to do you've really got to get your your head in the right spot and your heart in the right spot and approach those calls with with the right mindset and with the right emotion because it can definitely kind of consume you if you are not going into it in the right mind I think every every call we do we have to kind of flip a switch almost or put ourselves in check to make sure we're don't get caught up in the emotion of it to make sure that we are dealing with a family and in the right way and one of the first things I do when I'm training a new employee or a new person working around the Fairholme one of the key things I tell them is you have to repeat to yourself this is not my loss this is not my parent this is not my mom this is not my dad this is not my child because too often I think we can be standing there and in the heat of the moment you think well what if I was standing here saying goodbye to my dad and then you totally your head is not in into where it needs to be taking care of a family and you get teary eyed and you know you get overwhelmed by something that's not even happening to you and I think it's even greater when you're taking care of a child if you are a parent or you have nieces nephews and you know kids that you love around you that you think oh my gosh what if I lost my kid what if I you know I think that thought can more easily come into your mind when you're caring for somebody and so I always tell new people you know repeat that to yourself if you have to this is not my kid this is not my kid this is not my kid this is not my dad this is not my dad it snaps me out of it and I have been told that it does help because if we are getting consumed by emotion that is not our emotion of a loss then we are not caring for somebody the way they need to be cared for and so we are not doing our jobs so we have to stay in the right mindset we have to be the professionals we have to be the caregivers because it's what our job is and if we're not doing it who is going to be doing that rule so that is kind of the main thing to remember taking care of a child and taking care of babies you know people always I think when you lose especially a child that's why and I don't think we ever get those questions answered we never get to know why we never get to know what this is about but I think for me and I've had people tell me hate me for saying this and that I'm horrible for saying this but what I have done too personally I think find peace with dealing with lose you know loss of children and babies is knowing that they're probably better off that I you know I've cared for a lot of babies a lot of children and a lot of them were in bad situations you know where there was not the best family situation and so I can see where they were probably better off or I have to believe that a child is being saved from a worse fate down the road a worse death a worse life something that was going to be coming that was maybe worse for them in the future and that's how I have to look at it that this kid this child this kid is better off at peace then living a life that had sadness and her in it or living a debt to a death that was maybe worse of cancer or abuse or who knows what was going to happen down the road but that they were being saved from it and that's what I think and I believe and you know people don't like that people don't want to ever think that a kid should die but why shouldn't children die too everybody dies and everybody has this limited time whether it's a day or a hundred years and I know it's not fair it's not fair when you lose your 90 year old mother it's not fair to lose anybody and and children you know they haven't been exposed to the ugliness that is in our world you know the sad and the horrible things that are in the world and so they die with this pure heart and this pure kind of outlook on the world that everything is rainbows and you know it's that ignorant is bliss and it's you know I don't know maybe that's that's a better way than to have to live through seeing some of the things we see and some of the things humanity does so I put a lot of that into my mind and I put a lot of those thoughts in those feelings and that mindset at work when I'm caring for a baby and a family and you know that comes in and I never wished these people the people I care for to have this loss because it's horrible and it's just devastating especially when it's unexpected and a lot of anger does come out at us you know I've had mothers scream at me before just because I was the one there and it was just irrational and there was no need for it but they needed to give emotion somehow and it came to me and I took it and it's hard had to sit with some families that were suspected of a shaken baby syndrome or child abuse and they were still making the arrangements because nothing had been validated yet and so sitting with the people who may have caused that child's death it's really how hard probably one of the toughest things I've had to do and treat them as if they weren't under investigation that is really hard that is really really hard to do you know it's always easier when I worked at a funeral home that donates their their work and their services in the merchandise to a family of an infant because a lot of times there are these very young couples who don't have a lump sum of money to pay for a funeral they don't have grave spaces they've never even thought of this in their world and they all of a sudden have a child that they need to bury and they don't have the mindset resources anything at that moment to take care of the child so it's nice if a funeral home donates all of that that then I don't have to have that conversation at all and money is not even a factor and concern at the moment that moment so and I understand every funeral home can't do that but it is nice to when you're working for somebody that offers that because it takes the load off of you as a funeral director and arranger to be able to give sometimes so when I'm working at a funeral home when we take care of a baby I will bring in a rocking chair if they don't have one there because I firmly believe in rocking letting a mother rock the baby if she wants to or the father or grandparents I encourage holding the baby I you know everything that you wouldn't actually want to do with that child there let them do you know I find myself if I remember clearly standing with one mom and she had sat rocking the baby for a while and she was getting up to leave and so I was holding the baby at that point and you do the rock and pat as a mother you just do it instinctually if there's a baby in your arms you kind of sway back and forth and pat the baby's back and mean the mom kind of we chuckled and we cried and we chuckled and we cried together because we both recognized what we were doing and we thought we were crazy but we it's just instinct don't want to hold the baby if the baby's there and so like it hurts my heart when I know that there's funeral doctors who won't allow people to hold babies or hold the children and they just because they're uncomfortable with it they won't let families do it and that's such a sad thing to me because it's so needed and it's you know there's gonna be parents who don't want to touch the baby because it scares them and that's totally natural but there are parents who want to hold that baby or grandparents and so why didn't I do that is room a be really really important I worked at one location and they had a program set up through the hospitals in the area so if you have a fetal demise which means the baby did never lived outside the womb it's called the fetal death and we're still born baby and up to a certain point and it's more common up to a certain point that hospitals ask you if you want them to dispose on the baby or if you want to use a funeral home so a lot of times these are put into medical waste at the hospitals and discarded especially if it's early in a turnip regnant see and the baby hasn't developed very much where it's developed incorrectly they're just discarded if the family so wishes so one of the funeral homes I'd worked at set up this awesome program with the hospitals that they offered a free burial at this green space for those such babies that they were buried right into the ground because if there is no birth there's no death certificate so they don't have to be buried in the conventional way in a casket or anything so set up where these babies were buried directly into the ground clothing no marking nothing on them and they generated back into the earth so quickly we could use the same grave space and just rotate around it so I buried many many many many many fetuses out on that space for families and a lot of these families were young moms that were you know teenage moms they were very low income families lot of times the dads weren't involved anymore or the boyfriends or you know the fathers I guess I should say and got a huge perspective I think and that's where I think I got a lot of my some of the a lot of these babies are better off is because these parents couldn't care for that child they didn't have the means they didn't have the family they didn't have anything to care for this child once it was here and I saw a lot of that because the cremation if they did want to be be cremated it was like $50 or 25 it was just a small fee but most of them couldn't even afford that and if they couldn't afford $50 to cremate their baby all I could think was what are you gonna do in this babies here and it goes through 20 diapers a day and you need formula or you need you know clothing or anything for this child in you can't afford $50 so that to me was such a I openin when it came to caring for babies because there are so many people who can't afford to care for the kids that they're having and so what would that kid's life have been like if I had survived and if it had grown and there were no means to care for it so I have to ask myself those questions and I have to wonder you know if they are better off so that definitely gave me a unique perspective on babies and caring for kids and seeing these fetuses at all these stages of gestation and what are they he actually looks like ya in your belly I didn't care for which was really hard when I was pregnant working at the funeral home I cared for a fetus that was the same gestation as the baby I was carrying I thought it would be harder than it was but it was really it was very surreal I guess is the only word that I'm looking at a baby who has died that was however many weeks gestation I want to say it was around twenty twenty-one weeks gestation and I had a twenty-one weeks gestation baby inside of me you know it's just really I don't even know words to describe like it's just such an odd situation like to be an overall I think a lot of the baby calls have been handed to me when I'm at a funeral home because I'm the girl and you know women are motherly and just to see I don't know I don't know if it makes men uncomfortable a lot of males uncomfortable and at the funeral home and so it just got passed to me but I've done and dealt with a lot of families a lot of baby dust a lot of children deaths and I feel like I'm really comfortable with them it's not that it's easy it never gets easy but I'm comfortable and I feel like I do a good job at it and I feel like I connect with the families and so I I do tend to gravitate towards those calls and take them over wholeheartedly when they come in just because I have such a comfort level with them yeah so if you have any questions about this let me know I think that until you're just like anything until you're a parent you can't know what it's like to be a parent until you lose somebody you don't know what it's like to lose somebody until you're doing the job you can't know what it's like to do it you know and I think just so many people think oh it's so hard to take care of babies well it would be hard because a baby Dinah sad but it's not my sadness you know like and that's it's not me losing it just like anybody walking into a funeral home people always say how do you work at a funeral home is it so sad well I don't walk into that funeral home having lost someone like you do is always my response this to me is not a place of loss this is my place where I work and care for people so it's looking at everything from a total reverse viewpoint and it's the exact same way and caring for babies and children is I have to look at it from the total reverse viewpoint that I'm caring for the parents because this baby has died and I have not lost this baby it's already you know died when it comes to me so it's total mindset just getting yourself in the right you know prim the mind and believing in something you know I believe in got a cushion and I think that gets me through as well a lot of this mindset so yeah hopefully that answers questions and I'll talk to you guys soon

Channel: Kari the Mortician

Views: 320,526

Keywords: funeral director, kari the mortician, children, death, funeral home, mortician, babies, mortuary

Id: AFatvpg6Zc8

Length: 18min 6sec (1086 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 08 2017