In 1961, Lilian Thorpe gave birth to a stillborn boy, but she never had a chance to hold him in her arms or kiss him goodbye before his body was taken away.
For six decades, she didn’t know what happened to his body or where he found his final resting place.
Standing in front of his grave, marked only with a number, she touches the ground.
“Your mom is here,” says the 86-year-old.
“Now I know where he is,” she says, adding, “I just wish I’d seen him.”
Lilian, who lives in Stalybridge, in Greater Manchester, believed her little boy’s body was “discarded” after it was taken from her.
When he was born, it was the hospital that took care of the stillbirth care.
This meant that Lilian and many others who shared the same grief were never told what happened to their children or where they were buried.
Unbeknownst to her, she had lived for many years just two miles from where her son was buried in Hyde Cemetery on December 1, 1961.
“I never thought that day would come,” she says.
Lilian adds that the sadness she felt after her son’s death was “always inside her” but remained hidden.
“Even my friends didn’t know what had happened.”
She says she was treated “like it was nothing”.
“For me it was everything.”
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Lilian was finally able to visit her son’s grave after BBC North West Tonight enlisted the help of Mike Gurney, Head of Funeral Services at Tameside Council, to find the answers they’ve always desperately needed to know wanted to.
He searched burial records to find the baby and finally discovered the details in Hyde Cemetery’s burial register.
He found that eight other babies were buried in the same grave, most of them stillborn.
“It’s a privilege to be able to show people where their babies are [but] It’s sad they didn’t know,” he says.
He believes the authorities at the time “expressed a kind of stiff upper lip because they thought it was right for families to just get on with their lives.”
He encourages others to come forward and access the records by providing the mother’s full name at the time of birth, her address and her baby’s date of death.
Julie Harrington was also never told what happened to her baby boy, who was born on December 8, 1979.
The 61-year-old says she caught a glimpse of her son before he was taken from her.
She says she also thought “they threw it away”.
“I know they asked my husband, ‘Do you want us to take care of things?’ but he did not know which things, because nothing had been said.”
For four years, Julie, from Hollingworth, thought her baby, who the couple named Martyn, had been burned as medical waste.
“You didn’t get a birth certificate or a death certificate because they didn’t exist, so you just turned them off,” she says.
She says grief only caught up with her after she gave birth to a healthy baby girl and was referred for counseling.
Her counselor then contacted a local priest, who found out where Julie’s son had been buried, just a few kilometers from where she lived.
Julie then spent a year at his grave every day.
“I was just so sad that he was there, glad I found him and it was nice to be able to come too,” she says.
Clea Harmer, executive director of stillbirth and neonatal death charity Sands, says Lilian and Julie’s stories are something the organization hears “very often from those who were left behind a long time ago.”
“The idea was that if you didn’t let the mother see the baby and you didn’t talk about it, you wouldn’t upset her and she would get over it very quickly,” she says.
Clea says the stillbirth experience is very different today than it was in the past.
She says that historically, parents have been “equally devastated” and the grief they experienced was the same, but the way they were helped to cope with that grief was “so incredibly different.” .
Data from the Office for National Statistics shows that the stillbirth rate in England rose to 4.2 per 1,000 births in 2021, compared with 3.9 in 2020.
On April 7, 2015, Amie Reece of Stockport gave birth to a baby girl named Charlotte.
She says the memories of the birth stayed alive.
“There was no crying,” she says, adding, “It’s the silence in the room that weighs heavily.”
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However, unlike Lilian and Julie, Amie and her husband Ed were able to spend time with their daughter and say goodbye, make hand and footprints, read her a book and cuddle her in their arms.
“My husband bathed her [which] was nice as he was really looking forward to bath times,” she says.
“We picked an outfit to take her home in, so we put that on her.
“She also had name tapes – everything felt like she was ours and we were in no rush.
“We were told we could spend as much time with her as we wanted.”
A funeral was also held for Charlotte.
Since then, with the help of Sands, Amie, who also has two boys, has started a support group for those who have endured similar heartaches.
“I have these memories, and they’re good memories,” she says.
“Yes, they are sad – but I was still able to feel like a mother.
“I think that was the biggest thing for me because she was my first and I left the hospital without a child, but I was still a mom.”
It is a small consolation for Lilian to be able to say goodbye.
“Especially lately I’ve spent a lot of time getting upset every time I thought about it,” she says.
“But I’m a little bit better today I think because he’s here and it’s made a difference.”
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