TONTS. - Still birth & Art as Healing with Larissa Reinboth

Episode Date: March 10, 2024

Larissa is a freelance illustrator with many strings to her bow. In 2021 she decided to couple her creative powers with her entrepreneurial mindset and founded the bereavement care charity Possum Portraits. This charity provides bereaved Australian parents with keepsake portrait drawings of babies lost to miscarriage, stillbirth or neonatal death free of charge. You can find more from Larissa at https://www.larissa-reinboth.com and find more about her incredible work with Possum Portraits at https://www.possumportraits.orgAnd from Claire including updates on live events and her music you can head to https://www.clairetonti.comor https://www.instagram.com/clairetonti/You can contact the show at [e-mail] if you or someone you know needs support for perinatal mental health the following organisations are great resources:https://www.sands.org.auhttps://www.cope.org.auhttps://www.gidgetfoundation.org.auEditing: RAW CollingsSocial Media: Maisie JG Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which I create, speak and write today. They were Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation and pay my respect to their elders past, present and emerging. Always was, always will be Aboriginal land. Just before we start this week's episode, a warning at the beginning to let you know that we'll be discussing themes of miscarriage, stillbirth and grief. So if this is something that you find difficult, go gently with this episode or maybe skip to another one.

Okay, on with the show. Hello, welcome to Tons, a podcast of in-depth interviews about emotions and the way they shape our lives. I'm your host, Claire Tonti, and I'm so glad you're here. Each week, I speak to writers, activists, experts, thinkers and deeply feeling humans about their stories. Okay, big deep breath for this episode. I want to tell you a quick story before I introduce our guest. I think maybe five or six years ago I experienced miscarriage and it was utterly overwhelming for me and deeply confusing. I felt like the stories that I was told about miscarriage or what it would be like even from the medical staff that were there when they saw that there was no heartbeat were

very much about how it would feel kind of like a period. And it was no big deal really and that they were very sorry but it'll be fine and after it's all over, make sure you try again as soon as possible. For me, it was really traumatic. I won't go into the details other than to say I was incredibly shocked. It was not like a bad period for me. I ended up in hospital afterwards And I think it's really important that we have conversations about miscarriage and stillbirth because in actuality, it is so common. Every day in Australia, six babies are stillborn. Two more die as a result of neonatal complications. And in our affluent, resourceful society, a miscarriage still occurs every 3.5 minutes. So if it's happened

to you, you're absolutely not alone. And what I've learned so much through talking to other women that have experienced this carriage is that not only is it very common, but it's also really unique. Just like for some people, it may not have been very traumatic at all and just a natural part of the birth and, you know, the growing of little tiny humans. For other people, it can be utterly devastating. And so we just need to go gently and also give as much accurate information as we can around all of these topics. So I want to introduce you to Larissa Reinbos, who is a freelance illustrator with many strings to

her bow. In 2021, she decided to couple her creative powers with her entrepreneurial mindset and founded the bereavement care charity Possum Portraits. So this charity provides bereaved Australian parents with keepsake portrait drawings of babies lost to miscarriage, stillbirth or neonatal death free of charge. Now, this might seem like a really dark and heavy topic for a podcast episode, but talking to Larissa, gosh, the depth, the breadth, the power, the peace, the joy that she conveys, and also the level of care and deep insight she can give us about what to say to someone that may have experienced stillbirth or the comfort that she can offer parents who have experienced this deepest of griefs. It's just so completely profound. She's also just an incredibly

cool person. She's got this like incredible presence. When she popped up on my Zoom call, I just thought, my God, this is a person who is vibrating with aliveness. She's also a mum as well. And I'll tell you a little bit more about what she does. So she grew up and studied in the UK, attaining her MA in illustration and book arts from Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England. With a keen interest in craft, Larissa has engaged in artistic pursuits ranging from painting and jewellery design to photography, pottery and dressmaking. A polymath at heart, Larissa's career exemplifies her truly wondrous diversity of skill. She was the Assistant Project Manager of an Australian gold mining company's operations in Peru before being employed as development fund

consultant in Berlin, where she worked with businesses and startups in the arts and culture sector. But it is with illustration that she has found a medium as diverse as her interests and today specialises in the use of analogue techniques such as pen and ink and gouache and watercolour. Though she is fluently trilingual, Larissa prefers to write in English. This woman, honestly, she's incredible. She was first published at the young age of 17 with a poem in a young writer's anthology and has been writing stories and poems ever since. Since 2018, she has been represented by UK literary and illustration agent SP Agency, most noted in the industry for representing children's book laureate Lauren Child. Larissa's great love is the picture

book. Writing for young children allows her to live out her passion for words as well as pictures and she's looking forward to seeing her work in print one day. Okay, without further ado, let me introduce you to Larissa Reinboth from Possum Portraits. Thank you so much, Larissa, for coming on to Tons today. I'm so excited to be talking to you. How are you going? Oh, hello. I'm very well. Thanks for having me on. Oh, you're welcome. So you've reached out to me because you work for, well, you created, I think, a very incredible organization called Possum Portraits. Do you want to just tell us about how you came to be an artist?

I guess it's one of those things that happened. I just always liked drawing, painting, creative pursuits. And so naive that you are when you're in your late 20s, you're like, oh, well, I'll go to university and study nothing that's useful. I'll do a degree in fine art, you know. And then you come out of it at the end with, in my case, an honours bachelor degree and go, oh, what can I do for work now? Oh, not much.

And then you sort of have to become creative about the way that you put your skills out into the real world and make them work for you. Absolutely. And do you want to tell us the story about you and your sister, Annika, and how Possum Portraits came to be? Absolutely. It's a really wonderful – I love that part of Possum Portraits,

the back story of it. So I went back and did my Master's in Illustration, and my sister at the time was studying to be a midwife. And so as a student midwife, she, you know, went into work one day and experienced her first stillbirth. And, you know, understandably, she was quite shaken up by that event. And she also got to see from a caregiver's point of view, what the procedures are, what the situations are in hospital when this situation occurs and how parents are taking care of what this was in Germany what the situations are in hospital when this situation occurs, and how parents are taking care of what this was in Germany. And she got in touch with me and she said, I really think that parents need or could use something that is a beautiful reminder of

their baby. And she told me about the photographs that get taken of the babies and that they are actually in many cases can be quite confronting you know because the people that are taking these photographs in many cases are midwives nurses and many of them haven't actually ever been trained in how to take photographs you know a dead baby is a very confronting thing to take a photo of and so that these photos in many cases didn't really weren't really able to fulfill the grief support function of being a memento that you would actually conceivably put up in your living room or you know show your friends and family because they were quite you know very impactful images and she said well you're good at drawing why don't you why don't you draw these babies and I went hang on a minute you know I that that's a

very weighty task and you know I didn't even know that this was a thing. And so she basically began a program of educating me about why this is important and what it could mean for parents. And so I started doing it, started drawing portraits of these so-called angel babies for parents. And the feedback I got was just so overwhelmingly positive and so overwhelmingly, you know, grateful saying, thank you for recognizing my grief and for recognizing that this is something that parents feel they need. That when I moved to Australia in January 2020 with my Aussie husband and our daughter, I actually decided to make this pursuit into a charity. And that's how Possum Portraits was born. What was it like the first time that you went to draw someone's

child, an angel baby in that way? I was nervous because I was petrified that I wasn't going to get it right. And that when they saw the portrait, they were going to go, oh, you know, we don't recognize it, or this is not how we wanted it, or, you know, it doesn't look how we imagined that it would. And the exact opposite happened, which is that they, you know, broke down crying in both sad and happy tears and just said that they're so grateful to have their, it was a little girl, to have their daughter with them, you know, in a manner of speaking. And that really was the inciting incident, so to say, for going, wow, this really, this can really help people.

And when you go to approach drawing, what do you think a drawing does that a photo, even a good photo, can't do? I think it's probably because it's a drawing, there's just a level of abstraction there. It is slightly less confronting because you're not actually looking at, it's a technicality really, but you're not looking at the person, you're looking at a representation of the person. And so that can help put a little bit of distance between the viewer and the person depicted and just help with the processing of the grief, while at the same time keeping the person, in this case the baby, more present and just bridging a gap, I also think that in a way,

a drawing is more representative of where this baby is now. It's not physically with us. Whereas a photograph can sometimes give almost like a false sense as though it were, oh, it's right there, it's in the photograph, but it's not. And so I actually, in some ways all parents love the photographs of their babies even if they're not technically very well done because they are the only photographs they'll ever have so they'll always be precious and and obviously good photographs are fantastic you can put them up on the wall and you have albums and you can you can show them to friends and family

and that's fantastic but there's always a sense of immediacy, I think, with a photograph that a drawing doesn't have. It has a more timeless kind of a sense to it. It's more, there's a sense of the person depicted existing on a different plane. And that's exactly what happens when somebody dies in my mind. Do you have experience yourself of grief going into these settings? Have you had to do some training in the way that you speak to parents when you go into a hospital setting in that way? We don't actually go into the hospital at all. Yeah, because so all our drawings are done after the fact, which means that parents apply to receive a portrait and they send in their photographs that they have of their baby, good ones, bad ones, whichever ones they have. And we then compose portraits based

on the photos that the parents send in to us. That is a strength of our service offering in many ways, because that means that as long as you have a photograph, even if your loss occurred five years, 10 years, 30, we've done portraits for parents whose babies have died up to 45 years in the past if you have a photograph even if it's a polaroid we can do a portrait for you and so especially the longer ago your loss occurred there tended to be not as good or not not as an understanding and appreciation of grief and loss uh you know back in the day and the service oftentimes that and the understanding that parents were met with in these situations. And the service oftentimes that and the understanding that parents were met with in these situations was commensurably worse. And so often there's an

overhang, you know, a lack of closure, they have photographs, which, you know, often shot in very poor conditions. And so it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter what visual input we get, we can do a portrait from it, if you know, so many parents write to us and say, oh, you know, I wish I had a photograph of myself with my baby. And so that's what we can do. Supply a photo of yourself and of your baby and we'll stitch them together and create what we call a composite. You know, if your baby was in the neonatal ward, for example, and you've only got photos

with tubes and all this stuff surrounding them and sticking out of them and really looking very confronting, we can do a portrait without all of those medical paraphernalia. So there are so many options that we have drawing that photographs don't. Also, depending on the time at which photographs were taken after the baby, if they were taken very soon after birth or after quite an interval, the body deteriorates quite quickly. And so we can sort of attenuate certain visual cues that, you know, a photograph can't but show. And so we have many tools at our disposal to help parents create a memory of their baby that actually represents this baby in the way that they would like to remember it. Oh, that is so precious. I feel like I'm just, I just am in awe of this work that you do because I'm sure that for a lot of people,

it's an area of grief that we just don't want to talk about. Absolutely. And we don't want to acknowledge and we don't want to look at. And I wonder then about the isolation of parents when this happens. How common is stillbirth? That is actually one of the things that people don't really know how common it is. If you're a listener and you're in a public place, then you can have a look around and do a quick head count of the women that you see. At the moment, we only have statistics on women, which is why I'm saying women. And look around you and you can know that one in four of them will have a pregnancy or baby loss experience during their lifetime. That's what the statistics show us. And so that is a whole amount of people. In Australia specifically, there are around six stillbirths every single day. Two babies pass

away to neonatal death and a miscarriage occurs approximately every three and a half minutes. So that's in aggregate, that's over 110,000 families a year in Australia that are affected by what we call perinatal death. So miscarriage, stillbirth, neonatal death, pregnancy loss. And yet you wouldn't think so if you walked down the road. You wouldn't. And from what I can understand of miscarriage and pregnancy loss in my own life, I've experienced a miscarriage. And it wasn't until I started telling other women in my life about it that people kind of then tell you their story. And it's kind of very confronting, I think, to think how many families, parents, we haven't even spoken about fathers and partners

and what they experience, are going through this and it's sort of so hidden. Do you have a perspective as to why we don't talk about it? Yes, absolutely. I mean, the experience that you mentioned, you know, of only sort of experiencing a miscarriage yourself and then starting to, you know, talk to friends and family to tell them about your experience and all of a sudden, you know,

all these people open up like flowers and say, oh, you know, I've had one or, you know, I've had this happen to me or, you know, and in some cases, oh, this happened five years ago, ten years ago and you didn't even know it and they might have been quite a good friend of yours. So that is a symptom of the taboo and the stigma that still lingers in our society around these issues. The primary one, in my opinion, being grief and loss. we're quite bad at talking about these confronting situations. And I actually think that it's related to a can-do attitude to problem solving, I think, that we have in our society. You know, somebody tells you about a problem or a quote-unquote

problem, their baby has died, you know, a situation of loss. And in a very progressive, death-defying, outcome-driven society that we have, we don't really tend to sit with the problem. Our minds immediately kick into action and say, okay, right, so what can I do? What can I recommend to this person? How can I help them? Really, it comes from a place of empathy and wanting to be productive and be proactive, you know, for this person. But taken to the extreme, this particular attitude, it actually leads us to a place where the immediate solution for helping someone to overcome suffering is in effect to tell them they're overreacting. You know, we say, oh, it's not as bad as it seems, or we try to look for a silver lining. And in the case of perinatal death, so where your baby has died, in fact,

there is no silver lining. And so people inadvertently and without any malice say things like, oh, you know, at least it was early. And they don't reflect to say, to see that saying something like that is not helpful. It is completely invalidating a parent's grief for their baby because you're telling them really, you you know it was early and so it doesn't matter or shouldn't matter like why are you upset no one comes out and says it that way but that's the implicit understanding if this is what you hear as a bereaved parent you know things like oh you can always try again it equates one baby with another baby you know that babies aren't light bulbs. They're not interchangeable. They're all different. And so in the immediate situation of a bystander or an interlocutor and you're being told by somebody, I've had a miscarriage, I've had a stillbirth, you know, it's a confronting situation to put the other person in as well.

And they don't know what to say. And so in the uncomfortable moment, they search around for something that could make you feel better and they haven't got the time and space to reflect what is it that I could say that could actually be supportive. And I think our society has driven them to try and fix things. They're trying to fix things for you and they can't. They can be there for you and they can help you. But support doesn't look like saying, oh, you know, you can always try again.

What does support look like? So if you have, and because obviously one in four women have experienced this, so we all know people in our lives who have. What does help? What should people say? Obviously grief is very different for everybody. You know, it's complex. It's counterintuitive.

It's very non-linear and different people need different things to feel supported so I wouldn't say that there's a blanket oh you know do this but there are certain things that you can do or that you can rather certain things you should avoid doing because they'll almost always provoke a you know a non-supportive reaction and so I I would say, as a rule of thumb, you can entirely strike the words at least from your vocabulary when you're talking to a bereaved person. Don't say, you know, at least it was early, at least they're in a better place,

at least you can try again, at least you're young, at least you can get pregnant. All of these things are what I call these silver lining statements, and they're not helpful because they invalidate somebody's sense of grief and loss. And also to give grieving people space and time, you know, they are not on a linear pathway to a quote unquote recovery. And there certainly isn't a timeline for it that, you know, it should happen in one month or, you know, it should take X amount of time. So don't put these people on your schedule. Oh,

you know, it's been a year. I think you should be over this by now. That's really not up to you to decide. Try not to put your own discomfort and talking about these things onto the grieving person and say things that make you feel better, but aren't necessarily helpful to them. That's very difficult to do. I want to reiterate that nobody who's in a conversation with somebody who's lost their lost their baby is intentionally trying to be hurtful that's not at all the case but because you know we as citizens as members of a society really haven't been taught or haven't been educated at any point in an academic curriculum that starts from the age we are five all the way through primary school,

high school, then some of us go on to university, at what point do we study grief education? At what point are we told, hey, these are some helpful tips for, you know, if somebody experiences loss, this is what support looks like. We don't. And so, you know, it's really only trial and error. People who have experienced grief or who have helped people through grief know it, but they've learned by doing in the vast majority of cases.

And I think that connects to something you said before about our culture and the problem with our culture here in our Western way of being that, you know, we get on with things, we move things along, everything's glossed over, everything's an Instagram post or a lovely shiny moment, rather than the real reality that all of us will experience grief and loss, that death is a part of life. And that I think for me, in coming to terms with what happened to me with my miscarriage in the end, I realized that so often the process of having children and loving people goes hand in hand with the process of loss and grief. And that it's a part of that whole piece of being human and being a living being on a planet, you know, a rock flying through

space. I know that's quite a big statement to make, but I, and that to me, that's six years since it happened to me. So it's, it's taken a long time to integrate that. And I think that's exactly what you said about that time and space we don't give people. It's that immediacy of move on, try again. I think I got told this phrase, oh, your womb's sticky, so you should just get on with it immediately. Oh, God. Yeah, I know, right? It's awful.

I say that because if I was told that, I'm sure so many women are told that, that this is a good time immediately after to try again, you know? I was told that. I'm sure so many women are told that, that this is a good time immediately after to try again, you know, rather than acknowledging that you've lost something and been through something. And from a mental health perspective, that takes time and space to really grieve and process. And I guess also it's different for everyone too. So for some people, their experience may be that they would love to try again immediately as well. So it's just as we're all unique, it strikes me that we need to give more room for the uniqueness of people's

experience of grief and not rush them and try and create spaces that are non-judgmental, but that we're also normalizing talking about this stuff so that it isn't a shock when it happens to you or to someone you love or someone you know. And I think that's a big piece of what I found very challenging and what I think a lot of my friends found challenging that you are shocked by it because you just don't think it will happen to you because you're not told that statistic one in four very openly. And so it's almost like we wait, particularly for women, I think in a lot of cases, not just about miscarriage and stillbirth, but also other aspects of our bodies and our cycles.

We're not told things can happen until after they happen. So then I think even when I think about things like perimenopause or menopause, it's not until we're in the thick of it or even labor. There's lots of aspects of labor that women are in the thick of it and then they're sort of realizing that this can happen rather than having that education as you spoke of beforehand. I completely agree. I actually personally think that it's one of the greatest failings of our antenatal care system that somewhere in this nine months,

you know, it isn't mentioned by the way, this can happen, you know, and not to say it with a view to scaring people or to you know making them prepare for the worst when it might not ever happen in all likelihood it won't happen but if it were to then you just fall out of the sky you know like like you say you just everyone's a statistic until it happens to them exactly you know and then it becomes very personal very quickly and in fact health healthcare professionals are not excluded from people that don't know how to talk about grief. You know, we run a blog on the Possum blog,

which parents are able to write about their own experiences with pregnancy loss for our grief community, for their peers, for family members of peers to read about what it feels like, what the situation means, how people react, what you can do, what you can say, what you can avoid saying. And in many of these stories that I've heard and that also feature on our blog, it's health professionals that say things that they should know better, things like, at least it was early.

And so that's one of the reasons why we actually run a continued professional development program in perinatal bereavement care for midwives that's it's accredited by the australian college of midwives for continued professional development credits because again it's one of those you know things that are so peripheral really to the work that they do but when it does become, you can wreak so much havoc by not knowing how to behave empathically. And it actually has health implications for parents forthwith.

Many people don't know that grief is actually a neurochemical, physiological change in your brain. There are indicators, biological indicators in grieving people. It's a physiological phenomenon. It doesn't only have emotional and mental health outcomes. It actually has physical health outcomes. It's not something that's just in somebody's head. You know, they're not just imagining. They're not just feeling sad. There's actually an entire

cascade of physiological changes that are happening to their body in this time of stress and trauma we have for example we have studies on on mother infant separation and mammals you know which is essentially what we are you know and that gives us such a host on data of the levels of distress that are experienced by this organism when it's separated from from its baby and that's what perinatal death is, being separated. So when somebody tells you, you know, they're trying to make it better for you, your baby's in a better place. Well, to the parent, it isn't.

The baby belongs in their arms. If it's not there, it's not in a better place. It's not where it's meant to be. And so that's why these sorts of statements are not only unhelpful but untrue, not factual. How does grief manifest physically when we talk particularly about perinatal mental health or the grief and loss in that space for parents or mothers particularly? What are the physical manifestations?

Oh, there are many. I mean, I should preface by saying I'm not a doctor or a medical expert, but there are cardiovascular implications. You might have a decreased heart rate that has metabolic implications. There's an endocrine result consequence. So you might have decreased or you have basically a hormone imbalance. Certain hormones might be produced more, others less. It affects your immune system in the sense that your T-cell, so these are the white blood cells that fight infection, are produced in a decreased amount. So you might become sick more often. Cortisol,

which is an indicator of how much stress you're experiencing. So cortisol levels might increase. There's often sleep disturbance. You could lose weight or other people're experiencing. So cortisol levels might increase. There's often sleep disturbance. You could lose weight or other people gain weight. So there's quite a breadth of physiological responses that an individual might have, but there are categories into which all of these can fit in. And basically what it means is that you are in poorer physical health. As well as dealing with the fallout of your emotional response to what is

essentially, I would assume, one of the hardest things someone could go through. Have you had to put around yourself your own mental health supports to do this work? I actually, that's an interesting one for you to ask because you would imagine that somebody who routinely draws dead babies on a daily basis would need some help. That would be a fair assessment of the situation. On the other hand, I think I just so happen to benefit from being very emotionally resilient in and of myself. And so I think that helps me to do this work. It also helps me to know quite a bit about the problem and the perinatal mental health scene

because I can put all this into context. And also the fact that I actually am doing something to help gives me a sense of proactively doing something about it. And I think that safeguards me a little bit from falling into an abyss of depression and going, oh my God, look at all these dead babies. Instead, I can think, oh, look, this is another family that I've been able to help.

In addition, I think it helps coming at it from a completely non-medical point of view in the sense that I see a photo and really I look at it from a visual, from an art point of view. When you really get into the zone of creative endeavor, of creative practice, I almost, I stop seeing a dead child. I just see lines and shapes and light and color and I sort of, it becomes abstracted in my mind. I think if I had it front and centre every second of, you know, drawing these photos, this is a dead baby you're drawing right now,

that would be exceptionally confronting. But because your mind sort of goes into a different zone when you, or at least mine does when I'm creatively active and I don't see the subject matter as what it is. This is a slightly personal question, but do you have kids yourself? I do actually. I have a three-and-a-half-year-old daughter, and the first portrait that I drew after she was born

was probably the hardest one I've ever done because I could relate to it from a completely different point of view. I mean, I did also have a miscarriage. And so I've experienced myself the sort of, you know, inadequate responses from the healthcare system that if you're unfortunate enough not to have somebody very empathic look after you, the sort of responses that you're met with. I remember sitting, I had to have a curatage,

so basically where they clean your uterus out in a surgical procedure. And after this procedure, I was sitting in the hospital in a corridor on a bench, and my mom was there with me. And the doctor that had performed the surgery walked past, and I just sort of had this moment of blurting out crying. And my mom hugged me and stuff stuff and the doctor stopped dead in his tracks and he looked at us and he just said well what are you crying about why are you sad you know and and my mom who actually has experienced miscarriage herself as well you know she just kind of fobbed him off and it turned around to me and she said, look, some people don't get it, you know. And so that sort of, it gave me an enormous amount of confidence really that there's a peer community, people that understand grief, people

that understand the situation have in all likelihood experienced it or something like it. And that is why it's incumbent upon the people in this community to actually educate those outside of it because how are they going to know? is obviously another procedure that I didn't know anything about until that was something that I, you know, had to have. But I've experienced a physical miscarriage before that. So I was sent home after they had discovered that there was no heartbeat and sort of told, we'll book you in at the end of the week because we can't get you in beforehand. And so just stay at home. And if it does happen at home, well, it'll probably be like a bad period pain. So, but you should be all right. And what I ended up experiencing was very close to labor, which then resulted in me sort of passing out and being taken by ambulance to the hospital.

And the reason I tell this story, and obviously it's quite confronting to hear, but I tell it because I wasn't told that it could get that bad or that it could be like labor. And I'm sure just like in labor for some women, labor pain can be like a bad period. And I'm not even sure what that really means. I think we all have different experiences with periods, but labor for other women, and certainly for me, it was not that way. It was a totally different experience. And I almost felt like I became like an animal really in that moment, you become just so internal in your physical self. And that happened to me when I experienced my miscarriage. And I just was not

prepared for that by anyone. And so I can only imagine then the extension of that is if you then experience labor and stillbirth, what that must be like and the influx of hormones afterwards and all of those things, milk coming in or not coming in and that flood of grief but also physical changes that happen because of birth and pregnancy that we then have to recover from afterwards as well. It's just huge. And then to have medical professionals say, why are you crying? Oh, my God.

Or, you know, try again immediately or you'll be right. And you do come against nurses and midwives in the hospital who are incredibly empathetic, but you do also, I experience the same, come up against ones that are so insensitive to what's just happened to you. It's sort of mind blowing. In an ideal world, what do you think, you know, best practice would be for someone who, let's go with stillbirth, in that room, in that setting when that has occurred, what do you think from a medical and hospital setting

the best practice would be? That's a very specific question. You know, obviously doctors and nurses and midwives, there are so many procedures. In a sense, you're a patient and you fit into the surgery that they have planned after you and the broken leg that they have to attend to in the next room. And so in a sense, it is not a straightforward problem to solve. And I'm by no means telling the entire medical professional body in Australia what they should improve but um it is absolutely true that doctors you know don't always know better and in often you know in in some cases the the mother knows better and the

mother knows what's happening to her body and she's you know when she goes and she seeks advice or seeks help or says you know i i something doesn't feel quite right i'm not so sure about this you know in some cases that they're fobbed off because they're they're simply not being taken seriously you know oh they're hysterical or they're they're scared or they don't know what they're talking about or something you know it's kind of that their experience is not equated with medical knowledge and therefore inferior. And many people don't actually know that in, you know, you spoke about stillbirth specifically, almost a quarter of stillbirths are preventable and they occur as a

result of medical error or negligence. And so that is a whole host of babies that could have been saved. And that's too many. Also, what you said about, you know, you didn't know what was physically going to happen to your body. Nobody really prepared you for what this experience could look like. You know, in a sense, you were a scheduling item on this person's list. You know, OK, so you go home, then you have your baby, and then you come back and then

we'll look after you, you know, and it was basically just, it sounds like it was just a logistical procedure, okay, so this person's, this patient's going to go home, you know, do this, then they're going to come back, and there was no concern really for what emotionally, mentally, this situation was going to imply for you, what it was going to be like. That support that you might need, you know, other than physical, oh, you know, she's not in immediate danger of dying. It's just going to be a bad period. So let's send her home, you know, on the scale of things. She's not somebody that's coming in here with a cranial fracture. Let's tell her to go home and sort it out by herself and then she can come back and, you know, we'll sort of clean up the mess. But that's not adequate caregiving.

On the other hand, you know, there are real and significant pressures on the healthcare system to try and do right by everybody, and there are so many people that need help and they cannot look after everybody as well as they might like. And so that really is a systemic problem that we all as a society have to try and figure out. And the other thing that you mentioned, the postpartum body after stillbirth, a mother who has lost her baby, her milk will still come in physiologically. What does she do? She will produce breast milk and not have a baby to feed with it

and so these are the sort of silent things that people don't really see and they think just because there isn't a baby in this person's arms they're not a mother they're not a father they're not a parent and yet physiologically the mother will certainly have a postpartum body she will certainly have to recover physically from carrying a you know a baby in her in her body and the these are sorts of things that you you don't know if by the way if you know if this is your situation and you do want to know what to do with your with your breast milk there are there are you know you can collect the breast milk and donate it uh there are milk banks that take take milk you can freeze it uh in a certain shape um you know and and keep it

there are there's also medication that you can take to stop your milk coming in so you know but but again these things are not things that you would have necessarily thought about when you go to your let's say 20 week you know some checkup appointment and the sonographer says, I'm really sorry, but I can't find a heartbeat. Yeah, exactly. And I don't think that obviously I'm not a medical professional either. So I'm just speaking from my own experience, but I wonder if aside from the medical professionals and their needing to be more empathy and care within that setting, just more training and more awareness of just how emotionally fragile people can be in those settings and having better supports in place in an ideal world. But you're right, our system is

broken and increasingly underfunded and overwhelmed. So it strikes me that some of this has to be happening then within our own families and our own communities and our own village contexts. I agree. And that's something. Yeah, yeah. Do you want to speak into that a little bit? Sure.

I mean, it's also, you know, this particular topic that we're talking about is close to our hearts and it's easy to forget that there are, you know, groups like ours that suffer different, you know, medical conditions, diseases, what have you, and that they feel exactly the same way about their cause and they feel that somebody should be there to, for example, support their parent, you know, that's just been diagnosed with dementia,'s say or pick your disease there's always people that require additional psychological mental emotional support on top of the actual physical problem or disease or diagnosis that they might have gotten so where this pilar community is

by no means the only one that could benefit from additional support in that in the group and so that obviously puts enormous stress on the healthcare system as a whole to try and meet everybody's needs. And that's why, as you say, it's very important that we as a community, as a family unit, as a society, become more aware of how we can help and how we can provide that. I think you called it village support, which is a wonderful way of looking at it, I think. But that also means that people need to be interested

to find out how to help. And I think we're becoming increasingly isolated and siloed into our own little worlds. And of course, in this particular instance, we're talking about grief, we're talking about loss and death and all these confronting topics. And really, we'd rather not actually talk about it and confront ourselves with it. So people are having to jump over their own shadows to help and support somebody else that's going through this.

And so there needs to be a decision on their part to do so there needs to be a proactive choice to want to be helpful and to go out and educate yourself and inform yourself about how best to do that because it's not just a matter of somehow being born knowing how to do it i mean obviously some people are more empathic or more compassionate as a matter of course and they just somehow they just somehow intuit the right way to speak to somebody or you know the right way to behave and that's you know those people are sort of angels but not everybody's like that and also it's no fault of yours if you don't know how to react you know if you're sitting across from somebody and they're saying you know I've had a

stillborn and if you genuinely do not know what the hell to say, that is okay. That's not your fault that you feel confronted with this situation and you go, oh my God, what on earth? Like, what can I say to help this person? You know, that really is an indication that you are a social person and that you want to help. Yeah, absolutely. It strikes me in that grief moment that it's also almost impossible to say something worse than what's already happened to them. So you can't really make the situation worse because they're already experiencing one of the hardest things they're ever going to go through. And that sometimes gives me comfort. Even if you think you've said the wrong thing, I say this to friends all the time when they're talking to people who have lost someone. In the end, your presence and your care and your concern and the

food you bring, just being around can sometimes, if that's the right thing for that person, you know, some people want space, but often they really just want to know that people actually care about what they've been through. I mean, what's wrong with just, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry this happened to you. I mean, what's more validating than that? Yeah. You know, you don't have to fix it for people. In fact, you can't. You can be there for them.

And the way to be there for them is to just acknowledge their pain and their grief and validate it and say, this is fucking shit. Am I allowed to swear on your podcast? Oh, definitely. Yes. Yes. Yes. pain and their grief and validate it and say this is fucking shit am i allowed to swear on your podcast oh definitely yes yes yes like this you know this is i am i am just so unbelievably sorry that that this has happened to you and it's there's no yeah there's no silver lining it's just all up shit and yeah what can i do how can i be there here for you and also i think to be to be specific and proactive in the way that you offer support, because, you know, going back to the physiological changes that happen in a grieving person, you know, it can be very difficult to even complete simple tasks.

You know, you become forgetful. You lose a sense of time and place. And so if you say to somebody, you know, how can I help you? They might not actually know. They don't know what to tell you really. Or if you just send a text saying, oh, how are you? You know, then somebody might be composing a response to you for a week, but not really knowing how to send it off. So you can take the initiative and take some of that responsibility out of their hands a little bit and just say look I'll I'll come around tomorrow two o'clock and take your

dog for a walk does that sound good you know or I'm making pizza I'll drop one off at your house you know and to sort of make that make these sorts of take some of the some of the lighter decisions out of people's hands because actually making a decision takes effort. It does. And also our immediate response in our culture is often, I'm fine, you don't need to do anything. Don't worry, I'll be right. Oh no, I don't need any food. Don't worry about it, even if you do. Exactly. And I think on the flip side of that too, giving people permission to say you can ask for help people want to help and accepting help is sometimes really hard for us in our culture i agree yeah yeah because it you know it gives an indication that you're somehow vulnerable or helpless or you know you can't manage by yourself

and you're almost like a lesser you know like you have been, your need of help in this moment somehow makes you inferior in some sense, which is, you're absolutely right, you know, we're supposed to be able to do everything by ourselves and, you know, be competent at all times and all this. And when we feel that we need help now, whether that's because you've fallen down the stairs and you've broken your leg and you're on crutches, or whether you've had a traumatic event happen to you and you just can't cope emotionally at the moment you know they're sort of analogous to each other in the sense that that you need support um and then yeah people don't like being vulnerable and then like you say they sometimes can resist support i completely agree i a friend of mine um was diagnosed with a brain tumor and I watched her

do something extraordinary that has changed the way that I think now. And it's almost like being prepared because life will always deal us hands that are not great. And that's kind of strangely not a lovely thing to say, but also I think is helpful to be, you know, preparing ourselves for when things happen, because we will all experience grief. It's, we will all experience real, real hardship and times where we need help. It's just part of being human and part of our lives. And my friend created a roster and asked for what she needed and, and said, look, I, I, I'm going to need people to walk with me. I need people to create meals for me. Here is a roster. She put a friend in charge of it. And then people just wanted to help. And she said to me that what she realized in that was that rather than feeling

like a burden, people actually do want to help and they themselves get so much out of being helpful. And actually, it's much easier in a way to be the helpful person than the person accepting the help sometimes, strangely. And so not that we want to put that on people who are going through some of the most fragile things and particularly, you know, stillbirth. It's sort of utterly incomprehensible just how hard that would be. But just that full permission, like if someone is listening to this and has had this experience

or is struggling, you have full permission to accept the help and say, yes, I need that help. Yes, please bring me some meals. Exactly. And it absolutely does not make you weak at all. You know, in fact, it makes you very proactive at knowing how you can get better, which is accepting help from somebody that's offering it and just letting yourself be the person to receive

and almost guaranteed in another situation you're going to be the one that's giving help to somebody else. So it's all about a give and take, you know, and not feeling that it's an indication of lesser worth because you're in need of aid at a certain point in your life. You know, show me the person that doesn't. Absolutely. To get very specific now, so possum portraits, if people need to reach out or want to reach out to you, what's the best way for them to do that? So if you would like a portrait of your child, we actually have an online form that you fill out

and you can specify certain things about the portrait. Then we will always get back to you and clarify with you what your wishes for your portrait specifically are. So we'll always talk it through with you before. It's not just a question of you send off a form and then a week later you have a portrait in your mailbox. So we actually co-design the portraits with the parents and take their specific wishes and desires into account.

Only when that's the case will the parent actually receive a memento, a keepsake that fulfills the function and the needs that they are hoping it will. So it's a parent-centered approach, really, that we pursue. So that's the best way to get in touch with us. And there's obviously also other wonderful support services in this space that offer, for example, phone support, peer-to-peer support groups. There's counseling and therapists and social workers that you can seek out ideally you would have been or parents are given a sort of a discharge pack a memory box

in hospital with brochures and information on all of these services because it you know it is very difficult to a for for a parent in the immediate aftermath of this event to proactively go out and seek out all these support services when they don't really even know you know where to look where they are haven't had to deal with this before all of a sudden they're in the throes of you know anxiety and depression and now now have to go and look for all these services so really you you would have been given a fair bit of information in the in the in the ideal case Where do you recommend people go? Would it be Panda and COPE? Would they be the two organisations or there are other ones,

like the sort of main places for people to go to? Yeah, well, I mean, they're wonderful. There's obviously also, you know, the big ones. There's Red Nose, Pink Elephant Support, focused specifically on miscarriage, Bears of Hope. Then there's also the Stillbirth Foundation. They're sort of more research-focused. You know, SANS, they're all a fantastic organization, and they have specific bereavement care service that they offer.

Possum Portraits is a little bit different in the sense that we don't offer the sort of counseling-type services. We focus specifically on memory- and on yeah on providing an opportunity for parents to honor the ongoing connection with their baby through through a keepsake that's so beautiful and obviously i should i should mention as well that our portraits are completely free so we don't you know we we are a registered charity and you know and that means things like that all donations to us are tax deductible and obviously, of course, that our service also is free for bereaved parents to access.

Wow, that is incredible. Did you seek out funding? How did you go about creating Possum Portraits from that perspective, allowing them to be free and accessible in that way? Well, it was a decision I made early on because I noticed from basically doing these portraits as an artist on a commission-based structure in Germany, that the cost associated with buying such a portrait would be prohibitive for some families. And that basically, if it really was a bereavement care service, something that was literally going to make people feel better, help them cope, be a support tool on their grief journey, they shouldn't, you know, a financial encumbrance would be an access barrier.

And so that's why I decided to make the portraits free. The artists, on the other hand, that do the portraits do get paid because, you know, I believe they should. I have a strong sense that, you know, they should be remunerated for the very specific skill set that they possess. And so, yeah, we are fortunate enough to have, you know, a few major donors and we get some grant funding and stuff, but we always get more portraits than we're able to actually, sometimes than we have funding for.

So the fact that it is free does mean that we are incredibly dependent on sponsors and donors. And, you know, even if it's $5 a month, people to contribute if they think that this is a service that's important and that they want the world to have. I think it absolutely is. I would really encourage people if it's something that they can do to go and support Possum Portraits. I think the gift of art in enabling us to process these kind of complex emotions is immeasurable. And I think

what you're doing is extraordinary work in a space where I know a lot of people would not want to look into. And I just want to say thank you so much for the gift that you are giving to people in creating such beautiful memories. I think sometimes we dismiss art as sort of unnecessary or the thing that we do last, that we seek last in kind of this healing journey when we've been through something difficult. What do you think about the power of art? Yeah, I think often, you know, sometimes when I talk to people and they say, oh, what do you do? And I say, I do this, you know, they sort of don't, they can't immediately comprehend the full import of it.

You know, they think, oh, you know, it's a nice to have. It's sort of like an optional add-on, you know, except for they fail to recognize the actual, the support that this particular, in our case, keepsake portrait provides. So the relationship with a baby does not start at the moment of its birth. You know, it starts when, for most people, when they find out they're pregnant.

And over the next however many weeks or months they are pregnant, they are relationship building with this individual that's growing in their tummy. And so when a loss occurs, the relationship also doesn't just stop there, because it didn't start with birth, it started before. And so, you know, if somebody, you know, if you told somebody that your mother has passed away, that person wouldn't say, oh, go and find yourself another, you know, mother type figure. And ideally, you know, remove all the things that remind you of your mother and all the pictures and everything from your immediate surroundings, because having them around is just going to make you sad and you should get over it and forget about her.

Who has ever said that and yet when a mother loses a baby you know the the kind of implicit idea is you know get get rid of all these things that remind you because they're just going to make you sad and stop you from moving on which is not how our mind works uh you know and this is also not something i'm you know making up there's a psych psychodynamic theory postulated in developmental psychology called attachment theory. And another one called the continuing bonds theory. And they basically postulate that the maintenance of a relationship with a person to which we have an attachment is incredibly important for our well-being, for our emotional and our mental well-being. If you erased all clues of that person ever having been present in your life,

you would think you're going crazy. Your memory would remember things and no cue at all is present in your physical reality. You would think, what the hell, my mind's playing tricks on me. It's actually crucial for the healing journey to have reminders to have mementos around if that is the way that you like to process it i do know that there are some people who at a certain point just go right this is it and you know they do remove the cues and that is fine if they come to that decision themselves or if it's right for them after a certain number of months or years or

however long their journey takes but it is incorrect of us to expect this as a matter of course and that's what our grief support mementos are the keepsake portraits that we draw they provide an opportunity and a space for parents to commemorate and to recognize and to keep their babies present with them in their house. If they want to put it in a bedside drawer, that's fine. If they want to put it in a living room, that's fine. Anyway, parents get the portrait in digital format on top of the actual physical portrait.

And so they can send this digital format to the parents, I mean, sorry, their parents, so the grandparents, to the uncles, cousins, friends, anybody who would like a copy and they can display it too, you know. It's a shared resource that's available to families as a whole. Oh, it's just incredibly precious. And we just cannot underestimate the power of art to help us to heal. I just want to say that. I know I've already said it, I think, and I'm just saying it again.

I mean, I really believe that in song as well. For me, I'm a music person and I know that there's so much healing to be found in music and in poetry and something about visual art, and I think music does this in a different way as well when there's no words it can be so powerful because there's so much that that person can see in that that they don't have to articulate it doesn't have to be only one thing there's just so much in that um unspoken representation of their grief or their baby or their experience that I think we really do need. And not everyone, obviously, different people experience the world differently, but I

just think, yeah, what an absolute gift you are giving with possum portraits. And I know you also are writing a children's book, The House in Ollie's Tummy, and that's for siblings of babies who have passed away. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that? Sure, yeah. So this is a new grief support resource for families and specifically for bereaved children that we're launching this year. Because we have, you know, we've got feedback from parents who suffer a bereavement when they already have existing children, you children. And so they've had a stillbirth, they come home, and you've got a three-year-old saying, Mommy, where's the baby?

I mean, goodness me. And so the children's book is a resource that is not only for the children themselves but also for the family as a whole to help broach the topic, to enable conversations, to normalize grief reactions to help children understand about sadness and what that looks like in their parents and give them permission to be sad themselves so it's really a holistic resource that we're hoping to distribute via maternity hospitals so that it will actually be given to parents in the hospital discharge pack so that they can immediately weather those difficult questions when they come back home

and have a resource to call upon. And the book launch, the actual publication date is set for later in the year, end of the year. What a beautiful project. I just think that that's so special. What do you think it's important for parents to understand about the way kids will process grief? Well, kids process grief a little bit differently to adults. It's not that they don't feel it. They do. But because grief is so nonlinear and it sort of comes in leaps and bounds and it sort of goes, it oscillates, you know. So if you see a child playing happily in a corner or having a really good day, you think, oh, you know, they're fine, they're not grieving. That's not necessarily the case.

And so I think for adults, it's really difficult without specific insight into how children grieve. And, you know, the House of Knowledge tell me is going to have an education and resource section at the back where parents can read up on these sorts of things. You know, to not know exactly where your child's at with experiencing grief and how you can best support them through it. What the presentation of grief might look like in a three-year-old, a five-year-old, a 10-year-old. And so it's really important for parents to know more about this so that they can feel that they're in a good position to look after their children's grief, which comes on top of having to deal with their own grief. So there's a compounding effect there where you're in the throes of your own trauma,

and yet you obviously are the caregiver of another child, and you feel responsibility to look after them. But sometimes you don't know how, and you don't even know what signs to look out for and how best to support them. So it's an additional layer of complexity and of difficulty. And this is also relevant to parents that conceive a healthy child after a miscarriage or a stillbirth, because it's not like that that child that existed

or that was born previous to the one that is now alive you know is going to be erased from family history or didn't exist you know those parents are still going to want to say by the way you know you have a big brother or a big sister and you know this is what happened to them and so that that baby that didn't live is still going to be a person in that family and i I think that's the misconception, isn't it, that we just avoid talking about it with kids, that they don't need to hear it or need to have that acknowledged and best just to move right along.

Yeah, that's sometimes said to people too, but particularly for children, right, but that's actually not the best way to handle it. No, they're actually incredibly resilient and they are able to process things if they are delivered to them and in an age-appropriate format. On the whole, children look at the world differently, don't they? We all know that. And so in a sense, they're well-placed to absorb lessons on grief and death early and integrate them in a healthy way into an understanding of the world you know these things happen and they're okay and it's okay if you're sad

yeah it's okay if you're sad you know this is the this is the age the moment in which we can break this cycle of denial about uh oh you know you you shouldn't show when you're sad or you shouldn't uh you know you're not allowed to cry or, you know, be strong. And so I think that's why projects like this are incredibly important to validate and to give license to showing what feelings look like in that diversity. I completely agree. There's a beautiful quote on your site. Bereavement means learning to live with a powerful range of confusing and conflicting emotions.

Bottled up, these emotions can have damaging consequences in later life for the individual their family and society and that's from the childhood well-being center in the uk and i think that so succinctly puts what we're talking about into context that the way through grief is actually to feel it and to acknowledge it you know rather than to bottle it up. Yeah, I would absolutely agree with that assessment, yeah, because it's going to come out one way or the other sooner or later. And so if you can knock it on the head, so to speak,

you know, in colloquial terms, it's just it's in your interest, I suppose, as an individual and in our interest as a society. I'm not saying it's easy or that there's a straightforward path to making this happen. But, you know, baby steps and hopefully we can get there one day and be an emotionally resilient society that is at the same time able to give support to people in need rather than making them feel that as vulnerable individuals they have somehow lost some sense of worth. Absolutely and that all of this isn't something to hide and feel shame about but is actually a part of the human experience it's a part of people that have babies and and you know in, we all live, we all die. I know this is a very intense conversation to have, but I also think in a strange way, that's also comforting to know that it's a part of the fabric of being human rather than thinking

that it's our fault or there's something wrong with us or that we should feel shame for any aspect of all of it and a reminder that we can also handle it you know I think we've we can reach out we can figure out ways of supporting people through that and so just being prepared I think and and yeah I just want to say and we're about to finish now but I know I've said thank you for your work already but I'm just going to say it again. What an incredible organisation you have created in Possum Portraits. Just one last question, where did the name Possum come from?

Well, you might be able to tell from my accent that I'm German by birth and so, you know, I came over to Australia and somebody called my daughter Possum, said, oh, you know, and I thought, gosh, that's such a cute little nickname for a child or a baby. And so I thought, oh, it's got to be called Possum Portraits. Yeah. Oh, I love that. I know Possum is such a beautiful nickname and it's such a beautiful organization that

you have created. So thank you so much, Larissa, for the gift of this's such a beautiful organization that you have created so thank you so much larissa for the gift of this conversation for the work that you are continuing to do and i really encourage people to donate to possum portraits and yeah spread the word about what we're doing here and what you're doing particularly in this space so thank you so much thank you claire for having me on i really enjoyed it as uh as intense as. Thanks so much. You've been listening to a podcast with me, Claire Tonti. Deep breath after that episode. My goodness. I learned so much from Larissa and I'm so deeply moved by her work. If you would like to contribute to Possum Portraits, you can. They're a registered

charity, so you can head on over to their website, possumportraits.com. You can also find more about Larissa and her incredibly beautiful illustrations at larissa.reinboth.com. Her illustrations are just incredibly stunning for children and also for adults as well. For more from me, you can head to claretonte.com and you can also find me on Instagram at claretonte, where I love to tell stories and share about my upcoming events. I have some shows coming up very soon if you would like to hear me. I'm actually also a musician and I have written an album called Matrescence, which is about the complex transition

to motherhood. You can find that on Spotify, on YouTube, on Apple Music, and you can also purchase the artwork for this from my website, claire20.com. All the details are over there for where I'm going to be singing. I'm coming to Newcastle Fringe, March 22nd to 24th. And I'll also be around in Malwala and Shepparton the weekend of the 2nd and 3rd of March. And I'm starting to run Mums and Bubs classes. The first one is February 26th. I have more details of upcoming shows and things going on. I'm actually coming back to the UK in June. So there'll be more details for that on my website. Okay. As always, thank you to Rock Hollings for editing this week's episode and go gently. If you need more information, more resources, more places to go about this topic, Possum Portraits have a lot of information. I can also recommend COPE,

which is an organization within Australia for more resources around perinatal mental health. Panda is also another excellent resource and the Gidget Foundation, who I'm also an ambassador for. I really recommend reaching out to them. They actually have free counseling services for new parents. So lots of places that you can go or you can direct people to if they've also been affected by pregnancy loss, stillbirth and miscarriage. Okay. As always, sending you so much love.

Talk to you soon. Bye.