Memory Writing

Some parents find it comforting to write down memories of their babies, and these notelet writing prompts are here to help preserve that most precious connection.

Peer Support

Our ‘From the Heart’ notelets have been lovingly developed by Held in Our Hearts in collaboration with Dr Tamarin Norwood and Loughborough University, with the support of The Higher Education Innovation Fund (HEIF). These notelets are intended to support parents, through writing, to connect with and remember their precious baby. We hope they will help bereaved parents reflect and connect with the little one they love and miss.

Some parents find it comforting to write down memories of their babies, and these notelet writing prompts are here to help preserve that most precious connection.

They have been created by bereaved parents who are part of the Held In Our Hearts community, in collaboration with bereaved parent Tamarin Norwood, who is an academic at Loughborough University researching the meanings families create when a baby sadly dies.

You can learn more about the making of these notelets in this video.

  • Loughborough University’s Dr Tamarin Norwood and Held in Our Hearts are encouraging bereaved parents to try writing to make sense of their experiences of baby loss and feel connected to their children.
  • Dr Norwood and the Edinburgh-based charity teamed up earlier this year to create memory writing cards that provide a starting point for parents looking to communicate the feelings that come with baby loss, and these were distributed across Scotland.
  • Seeing how the cards helped families, Dr Norwood and Held in Our Hearts are now looking to raise awareness of the benefits of writing on a wider scale in the hope of helping parents at what can be a difficult time of year.
  • Dr Norwood, who authored a prize-winning essay on the birth and death of her son, believes writing can start important conversations with friends and family and work towards “breaking the taboo and stigma that surrounds baby loss”.

Dr Norwood, whose research looks at how bereavement and creativity can be combined, teamed up with Held in Our Hearts to create memory writing cards after identifying that there were few specialised writing resources for parents whose babies have died.

These packs are now gifted to all families the charity supports in Scotland and available on our website – titled From the Heart Notelets’.

Dr Norwood said: “When parents have the opportunity to create their own stories and to really think about what that experience means for them, it can be really transformative because that lack of stories is one of the things that makes it so hard to get over the experience of baby loss.

“Very often parents find that because their loss isn’t really acknowledged socially, they’re not really sure what they have lost.

“If parents can learn to understand that it’s natural to feel as awful as they do and that these lives are worthy of many, many stories – rich, long, big stories – then that can really improve bereavement outcomes.”

She continued: “The cards we have created, and writing in general, gives parents a chance to make sense of the experiences that they’re living through and to give them an opportunity to start conversations with family and friends who may not know what to say.

“This is part of a wider goal of gradually breaking the taboo and the stigma that surrounds baby loss that means that when parents lose a baby, they feel like society understands and accepts their feelings of grief.”

From the Heart Notelets available on the webshop

From the Heart notelets are gifted to families receiving the hospital memory bag

Held in Our Hearts CEO Nicola Welsh says blog writing also helped her process the death of her three-week-old son in 2009.

Of what she hopes the memory writing cards and online campaign will achieve, she said: “We hope the cards and encouraging people to write will help families connect with their babies in a different tangible way.

As well as helping to develop the notelets, Dr Norwood ran a series of writing workshops with a group of bereaved parents where they were able to explore creative writing as a means of processing their grief and memories of their babies.

Dr Tamarin Norwood and Held in Our Hearts worked on the project with co-investigator Dr Rob Tovey, also at Loughborough University, with advice from bereaved mother Dr Corrienne McCulloch.