Our Missing Peace founder 'breaking silence around parental bereavement'

The Kilcreggan mum and her armed forces husband have suffered heartbreak and loss on a scale unimaginable to most families: their first pregnancy was cut short by miscarriage, a situation which sadly repeated itself twice more following the birth of eldest son Alistair, 10.

It’s now eight years since second son Ben tragically died in a freak accident, at a day short of just four months old, turning the couple’s world upside down.

They have since grown their brood with rainbow baby - the term coined for a child born to a family that has previously lost a child - Toby, 6, and four-year-old Edward, and Nicole has been working tirelessly since 2017 through her charity Our Missing Peace to share her story and open up the discussion around parental bereavement.

“Ben died in 2012 and I didn’t start anything until 2017 because we needed to focus on our own family,” the 35-year-old told the Advertiser.

“There was a lot of work that I needed to do personally to be OK to talk publicly about the situation.

Ben died just one day short of four-months-old

“We were living in Helensburgh at the time but we moved down to London, from the safe space of Helensburgh and the military community, to a place where nobody knew us and nobody knew about Ben and our history.

“People were asking me how many children we have, and at the time I didn’t, and I still don’t, know how to answer that question.

“It just became really apparent that there needed to be a simpler way to let people know that our child had died but we were OK to talk about it.”

After “taking the bull by the horns” to compile information and resources for parents suffering similar experiences, Nicole launched the Our Missing Peace movement, which has been supported by First Minister Nicola Sturgeon at the Scottish Parliament, as well as by MPs at Westminster.

A purple heart badge featuring a missing jigsaw piece has become the symbol of the campaign, acting as a statement of solidarity in efforts to break the silence surrounding child loss.

“I wanted to create a way for other bereaved parents to know that if they see the badge they know they aren’t alone,” said Nicole.

“Whilst living in Helensburgh the Scottish Cot Death Trust had been helping us because they don’t just help people whose children have died with cot death; they help anybody whose child has died suddenly.

“We had their support for two years and it was amazing. They helped us with having Toby.

“But when we moved to London and I tried to access similar support it became really apparent that it was a bit of a postcode lottery.

“Some charities can only provide support in certain circumstances, so families like mine sometimes end up falling through the gaps. Unless we get picked up by a really kind person, we get left alone.”

Nicole’s charity movement subsequently took off and it has successfully united the bereaved parent community, establishing a vital support network.

In helping others, the campaign has also acted as a coping mechanism for its founder.

Nicole launched Our Missing Peace in 2017

Nicole said: “It has allowed me to be comfortable with my own story and not feel shame around what happened whilst also connecting with other people and giving them hope.

“We’re eight years into it and when you first lose a child there are no words to explain how hard that process is. It’s only when you do talk to other bereaved parents that you realise that it’s normal to feel like this and these responses are normal.

“That was the intent, I wanted people to share. I knew other bereaved parents - I was lucky, so to speak, in that I had friends who were able to guide me and show me that 20 years later I wasn’t going to be all consumed by my grief. I wanted to share with people that it wasn’t always going to be as hard as it initially is.

“In doing that I have become more comfortable, more confident, more stable in my grief and more secure in it and one of the biggest things is I’m not ashamed of talking about it.

“That has helped so many people, not just those who have lost children.

“It’s not something that we as a society are comfortable with, especially in social media land where everything is perfect and we only show the good parts.

“I have good parts and bad parts and I show all of it. That’s what we do with the social media pages we have. We share it all.

“When your child dies you do think you’re going crazy and actually it’s just a normal response to an abnormal situation.

“It’s a whole jigsaw that people don’t necessarily understand and it’s nice knowing that other people get it.”

Since her own experiences of child loss, Nicole says much progress has been made in raising awareness of the issue - but there is still scope for improvement.

She said: “I’ve helped inform the National Bereavement Care Pathway, which has been brought in in England and is being worked on in Scotland.

“A lot of organisations have since been established and certainly in the last three to four years there’s been a big push for Baby Loss Awareness Week in October.

“Social media has a massive effect. People are willing to listen and are able to find each other, whereas before it was definitely an underground club that you only knew about if you’d been affected by it.

“Charities have been able to gain more traction in the last six years than they have done in ages. There’s been a big culture shift with people needing to talk about the harder aspects of life. There’s a big push behind mental health.

“All these big things have been happening and we’re riding the crest of a wave.

“A prime example is this year for Baby Loss Awareness Week Channel 5 had a programme dedicated to miscarriages, whereas two or three years ago it was just a 10-minute segment on the news.

“People are willing to go there a bit more but it’s still nowhere near as big as it needs to be.”

Alistair and Ben

To help realise the campaign’s ambitions, Nicole hopes to get the word ‘vilomah’ - Sanskrit for ‘against the natural order’ - recognised in the English dictionary in the absence of a proper term to describe bereaved parents.

She added: “We’re starting to make a movement but we still don’t have an official place in the world.

“There’s still a lot of work to be done but we’re getting there, we’re making moves.

“If I could I would make it global.

“The charity itself is a signposting service. When we work together our voice is louder, and that’s very much what I stand for. I want to make our voice louder and allow people to see that we’re not scary.

“I want to show that living life after your child dies can be positive.”