What happens when words are not enough? Luckily for these women, they found articulation through art
WE'RE NOT good at dealing with the death of a baby. Unless you count the ghastly terms "stillborn" or "perinatal death", we don't even have a word for it.
Nor do we have a word for a parent whose child has died. After a period of numbed silence, therefore, bereaved mothers are usually encouraged to get on with things. Think of the living. Try for another baby. Keep moving.
Counselling is, of course, one way to try to come to terms with the loss of a child. But counselling is language-based - and language, as we've seen, doesn't excel in this area. "Asking somebody to tell their story is not always the most appropriate approach, because the story doesn't always translate into speech," says Pauline Keena.
A visual artist and trained midwife, Keena has been helping bereaved mothers to express their grief in another way - through the making of art.
While working on a specialist unit at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School in London, Keena encountered infant death on a regular basis. "As a staff member it was very harrowing," she says.
"And I never stopped wondering what happened to the women when they left the hospital. One day a mother, who had lost her baby a year earlier, came in and was chatting to us. She went over to the corner where her baby used to be nursed, checked the name on the incubator, and had a look around.
"I realised she was actually checking to make sure it wasn't her baby - and I was astonished by this level of pain. A year on, this woman had resumed a working life and a family life; and yet she was coming back into the hospital to make sure that the death of her baby had really happened."
Now based in Clane, Co Kildare, Keena likes to combine her work as a sculptor with occasional midwifery shifts in the Rotunda, "to help pay the bills", as she cheerfully puts it.
Two years ago she approached the master of the hospital, Dr Michael Geary, with an idea. "It was a pretty tall order," she says. "To ask the director of a big, busy hospital; 'Can I set up an artist's studio here to do this work?'"
The Rotunda, however, has an imaginative programme of ongoing care for bereaved mothers, and Geary agreed with alacrity. He gave Keena his conference room, "the green room", in the basement of the hospital.
Four women were selected for the project - though many more applied - and they met on Tuesday evenings for almost a year. "I didn't know how to start," Keena admits, "and I told them I didn't know what to do. I felt it was very important not to impose a framework on their experiences. "We started working with materials, and talking. Sometimes not talking. Just waiting, or having coffee."
The women kept journals which Keena has carefully documented, along with a mountain of sketches, drawings and other pieces such as stained-glass work.
Slowly, the grief began to unfold. One mother recalled how she stopped talking when her baby died. Another, whose baby had lived for a few days, remembered wondering whether the family was entitled to a funeral; does four days count as a "life"?
After about six months Keena gave the mothers - Linda Wilson Long, Valerie Dunne, Kay Kearns and Kate Horgan - some soft, lacy fabric.
"I asked them to take it home and keep it around the house for about a month, and think about the relationship between cloth and body; especially the baby's body."
Neither Keena nor the mothers were prepared for what happened next. "The physicality of the cloth brought up a huge amount of memories," she says. "One of the babies died 25 years ago. And one of the mother's huge sorrows was that the baby had never had any clothes. She had never said this to anybody. She ended up making an exquisitely beautiful dress."
The sculptures made by the women form a central part of the Green Room exhibition; ghostly echoes of clothing whose silence and fragility speak volumes. The project was commissioned by Kildare Co Council - the first local authority in the State to employ an Arts in Health specialist, Nicola Dunne, in 2007 - under its Support for Professional Artist programme. And the exhibition catalogue, put together by designers Jamie Delaney and Keith Nally and photographer Rick Gilligan, includes short articles by, among others, the arts officer for Kildare Co Council, Lucina Russell, and the artist and educationalist Timothy Emlyn Jones, and is an exhibit in itself.
A central exhibit of the Green Room project is a neon drawing, made by Keena in collaboration with the young son of one of her mothers. It was inspired - if that's the word - by the experience of a mother whose baby died almost a decade ago. "After about a month the mother went to get her birth certificate, and was queuing up with all the other mothers," Keena explains. "Everybody else had a pram with a baby in it, so it was very difficult for her to even stand in the queue."
But when her turn came at the window, her ordeal wasn't over. "There was no record of the baby's birth. They checked and re-checked the documentation, and eventually the girl at the desk said, 'Are you sure you had a baby?'"
Keena's drawing is stark, simple, shocking. "I wanted to document that state of being which is very specific to the bereaved mother, where her sense of identity deserts her," she says. "I wanted to present it as something real - something that exists in the real world. You see neon signs all over the place." You see bereaved mothers too. It's harder to read them, though.
• The Minister for Health and Children, Mary Harney, will open the Green Room Project exhibition in the front hall of the Rotunda Hospital on Wednesday, October 15th at 12.30pm. The exhibition then moves to the education exhibition area at Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane from October 21st to November 11th. Pauline Keena is at paulinekeena@hotmail.com
