Share. A good word. A word with positive connotations. Share with others. Share your good fortunes. Share your feelings. Share your pain.
Share your pain? What about keep a stiff upper lip? Bite the bullet? Keep your chin up?
The problem with those axioms of yesterday is quite simply that they didn`t work. What works, though, is acceptance: sharing pain, sharing grief, sharing sorrows. When parents experience the devastating loss of an unborn or newly born infant, SHARE, a national infancy loss support group, insists that recovery is facilitated by acknowledging and releasing the pain, the anger and the disappointment-not by denying that a baby died and that the hurt is immense.
On Friday, several people who have been emotionally touched by such a loss will share the intimacy of those feelings through a play cooperatively sponsored by Good Samaritan Hospital, the Theatre of Western Springs and national SHARE Pregnancy and Infant Loss Support Inc.
”Cameo,” a one-act play about the loss of a baby, will be presented at 8:15 p.m. Friday and Saturday at the Theatre of Western Springs.
The playwright, Linda Anderson, wrote the three-character play after losing a child and has designated all proceeds for national SHARE.
”It`s the story of a couple, happily, joyously expecting their first baby, and you can feel it with them,` explained Ginny Richardson of the Theatre of Western Springs. ”The baby is stillborn, and all the wrenching emotions that occur because of
that come out. It`s only through painful conversations that they begin to resolve it and they turn a slight corner into healing.”
Producers are not billing this as a play for the general public. Instead, they are targeting health-care workers, funeral directors, ministry, social workers and bereaved parents.
”I don`t think if you want to go out and be entertained for an evening, that this play is for you,” warned Pat Vaci, Good Samaritan`s SHARE coordinator. ”But there`s something in it for everyone. It`s about feelings, and it`s very heavy. There will be a lot of time afterward to just sit quietly, and many support people in the audience will be available if anyone needs processing afterward.”
”This is not for the mainstream public,” Richardson agreed. ”You`ll go through this, you won`t just be observing. The catchword to this play is empathy. Our goals are that it be used as a teaching tool or as a catharsis.” For Richardson, the play`s publicist, it is a catharsis. After spending years denying her own loss of a son born full term 20 years ago, today she is able to talk about her grief.
”I know firsthand the sense of isolation these parents feel,”
Richardson said. ”The message back in `72 when it happened to me, from all the authority figures, was to treat it as if it didn`t happen, and I went right along with it. There was so much denial. I didn`t see the baby; I felt I was a bother to everyone; you feel an isolation like leprosy, where no one knew what to do or say.”
Modern psychologists recognize, however, that pain denied is not pain that goes away; eventually it resurfaces.
”I was in denial eight years,” Richardson said. ”I was headed for a major depression. Each September, I`d have trouble. I`d stand in the kitchen making dinner and think, `What`s this on my face?` and it would be tears.”
Richardson, who has since given birth to two healthy sons, had thought that would be enough for healing; instead, she was headed for a breakdown.
”I had a one-weekend crying marathon, and that was the start of it,”
she said. ”I went to a therapist, but even then I didn`t tell anyone. Even then I was ashamed to have needed help.”
That shame was in part brought on by a medical community whose reaction to her loss was to ignore it. Although she doesn`t blame the nurses, whom she said had been taught to change the subject if talk about the baby was raised, she does resent her doctor`s insensitivity.
”The doctor walked in with the autopsy report,” she said, ”and I started to tear up-I don`t mean wail, just tear up-and he just went like this,” pointing her finger and saying sternly, ” `Hey, hey, cut that out!`
”I`m euphoric that it`s handled differently today,” said Richardson, who works as the director of public relations for Hinsdale`s Wellness Community. ”I don`t want what happened to me to happen to anyone else. I wonder how many years of private grieving could have been saved for me.”
Vaci believes that this play can raise awareness about grief. After seeing it in Atlanta a few years ago, she wrote the playwright for a copy of the script.
”Then I put it on the shelf, because I didn`t know where to start,” she said. ”Then I saw it done again in St. Louis, and I had those same feelings again. I was so moved, I just had to do something.”
Vaci talked to Flo Northrop, the director of obstetrical services at Good Samaritan, and Northrop suggested a perfect resource: Ginny Richardson, who was working at Good Samaritan at that time, was involved in theater and knew about infant loss.
The project snowballed: Richardson knew Chuck Bona from theater work;
Vaci knew Bona because of a loss in Bona`s family; the Theatre of Western Springs` artistic director, Ronn Toebaas, supported the group, and nothing could get in the way of the avalanche that Vaci started.
Vaci believes that this production was simply meant to happen and that it has a strong teaching potential.
”The theory of grief says there are four stages,” Vaci said. ”There`s shock and numbness, then searching and yearning, disorganization, then reorganization. Before, the way we were handling it, we were feeding into the stages, into the denial.”
Then, many people became stuck in a stage, unable to move on with the process. Now, Vaci said, awareness has increased but can still be improved.
”People recognize the grief the parents go through more now,” she said, ”but they`re not always comfortable with the length of time it goes on. They`ve moved on, so they think these people should have gone on with their lives after a few months, but it just doesn`t work that way.”
”Cameo” director Chuck Bona can also give testimony to the changes in the last few decades. During the 1960s, he and his wife, Cele, suffered the pain of two miscarriages, as well as the births of a stillborn baby and two children who lived less than three days. Then, two years ago a granddaughter was born critically ill and lived just until weeks short of her first birthday.
”Ginny sent me the script,” Bona said, ”and asked if I`d direct it. When I read it, I thought, `No way; the audience will be walking out in droves.` I told Ginny it`s not for general audiences, and she said, `It`s not, it`s for SHARE.` ”
Bona, who was familiar with Vaci and SHARE because his granddaughter was born at Good Samaritan (she was later transferred to Loyola Hospital) not only agreed to direct but also refused a salary.
”It seems like everything is coming to a full-circle culmination,” he said. ”My wife and I have come a long way to acceptance. We lost our last child in 1963, and we have two girls buried in Texas, and we had never been back until just this year; we went to the cemetery, and it was a joyous moment, a feeling of ownership.”
Bona believes that today`s health-care system is much better equipped to handle parental grief.
”My daughter had all the help in the world,” said Bona, a Hinsdale resident and a dentist in Chicago. ”The neo-natal care at Loyola was outstanding. There are still people in health care who think you should forget it, make believe it never happened, and get on with your life. But you have to acknowledge it and you have to grieve to be able to get on with your life.”
Bona said that the play illustrates the denial of loss through the characters Jill, her husband Stan, and Jill`s mother, Connie.
”The play pretty much depicts us at that time in that my wife never saw the children, no pictures were taken, and I pretty much arranged the service and burial,” Bona said. ”I`m not very proud of that now, but that`s what I thought was proper at the time. It took a lot of years for us to acknowledge our grief, but we`re in good shape today.”
Richardson is also in good shape today.
”I`m amazed at the joys I have in my life,” she said. ”The hardest part of the whole thing was not being able to say hello to that baby, to acknowledge it as a person. You have to say hello before you can say goodbye, and that`s what hospitals are so much better at today.”
Richardson said she still feels her loss, but it`s a different kind of pain.
”I don`t dwell on it,” she said, ”but it comes, and it will come the rest of my life, and I accept that. Now, in September, especially when it`s that day, I`ll think, `Thanks for letting me survive.` ”
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Tickets for ”Cameo” are $10 each, with proceeds to benefit national SHARE. For information or reservations, phone 708-963-5900, ext. 1520
