A journey through unimaginable loss and love

Next, as in classic fairytales, the baby was on the way, and they would all live happily ever after.

A life so damn good, it really was like something out of a movie, it was almost perfect.

Until it wasn’t.

Today, instead, their life is an open book, and the newest chapter in their story is one of utter loss and pain.

On October 5, 2024 — a date forever etched in their hearts — their stillborn son Ukoah was delivered, at just 30 weeks.

“We saw the doctor on the Monday, a routine appointment and everything was so fine, so normal, so exciting,” Chloe and Jed said.

“But we were back there on the Friday because there had been really worrying reduced movement.

“And we were too late, our baby was gone, our little baby was gone.”

Today Ukoah’s story is also an open book, a book called In Loving Memory of the Children, but which is as much a repository as a book, for it will hold the very short stories of very little lives which so many families will never forget.

The book will be cared for by the maternity unit at Echuca Regional Health where parents, extended families and friends can record their own stories of a love so painful it seems almost impossible to overcome.

Sadly, there are already entries alongside Ukoah’s in this heartbreaking gift.

Which is, and definitely isn’t, what they hoped for. In that lost perfect world, there would never be another story like theirs to tell.

“Ukoah’s life is so important to us, in so many ways he was, and is, our whole life, and we want to remember him, we want people to remember him, to talk about him,’’ Chloe and Jed said.

“But we also want people to talk about it all, about the six children stillborn a day, every day, in Australia and children who will, and do, die soon after being born.

‘’Often there is no explanation, but that does not mean there also needs to be some sort of silence, a no-talk zone around the parents and families going through this devastation and their grief from their loss.’’

For Chloe and Jed, the finish line in their fairytale was 12 weeks.

Get through the 12 weeks and then you tell everyone — that you haven’t already whispered the news to and sworn to secrecy.

Get through 12 weeks and it’s time to kit out the nursery, pack the hospital bag, put up that wallpaper you love and push the cot right in front of it.

The fairytale is all yours.

“When we lost Ukoah, for us, we were able to create memories as a family of three, within just a few days,” Chloe and Jed said.

“We had beautiful photos and keepsakes created for us as well as sharing our son with our families following his birth.

“At the time, the memories were devastating, it was simply shattering that we had to make them in that way as a family but looking back the photos are now so important to us, and being able to share them and our memories with others is comforting.

“Just as we hope it will be for others and their stories.”

Chloe and Jed have been overwhelmed following Ukoah’s death and birth with the number of people who have similar stories to share, stories they want to talk about, want to share, want to live.

“We have discovered that in so many ways bereaved parents and families want to stay connected, we do,” Chloe and Jed said.

“For us, we didn’t realise just how many others this affects.

“Through the use, even the power, of our grief we wanted to create a place for other bereaved families within our community to share their child.

“Through this journal we hope it is a place of honouring and remembering our, and every other families’, beautiful memories, memories which have to be created in such a short time, and which then count for a lifetime.”

But at this point Chloe and Jed’s stories diverge.

Once they were told Ukoah was no longer alive, the machinery of system took over and it happened frighteningly fast.

There were doctors, nurses, administrators, paperwork, the delivery suite, the caesarean, the lights, the drugs — and it was all happening to someone else.

As they tried to simply process the tragedy, Chloe became the focus of everyone, and in those moments when they would have been together, science and the system pushed them apart.

Jed marginalised by surgery and circumstance, Chloe forced into the spotlight by urgency and concern.

“It was so isolating, so scary, so final,’’ Chloe said.

‘’Going into maternity to have your baby but knowing you would be going home as a couple, not a family, how do you understand that in the space of just a few hours in a whole life?

‘’You can’t come to terms with anything like that, that fast, you can’t. And you can’t escape it.”

“I wanted to support Chloe,’’ Jed said.

‘’I wanted to be a father figure, fathers can help control things in life, but I couldn’t control anything.

‘’There was so much happening, so much to come to grips with, and it all seemed to be happening at once.”

Chloe and Jed would share the grace of a very short time with their baby, courtesy of the hospital’s Cuddle Cot, precious family time they will forever treasure.

But in the end, even that time would not, could not, ever be long enough.

Because if you thought things could not get worse, they were about to.

The couple made the hard, the so very brave, decision to order an autopsy on a child — and had seen enough crime shows on TV to know what was coming.

Yet, in their hearts, they wanted to know what went wrong, to understand “why us?”

“For us the decision in those moments following Ukoah’s birth to choose an autopsy was gut-wrenching,’’ Chloe and Jed said.

‘’It was never something you think of for your child. If someone else was to experience this, we hope they know the medical staff can provide a lot of support in those dark moments.

“Now we are just trying to manage today, and tomorrow and wherever we go next – which will be in our caravan to Port Lincoln in SA (Jed’s hometown) and then who knows where, but certainly north when winter hits.”

But if Chloe and Jed’s pain is still so easy to read in their words, and on their faces, their eyes are immediately brighter when they turn back to ‘his’ book, their time with him, their memories of him.

A light they want to see in the eyes of the parents who will follow in their sad footsteps and who they hope will share their grief, their love, their thoughts and their dreams on its pages.

The brightest of light, as the cover of the book says about Ukoah: a bright shining star in the sky.