It was early one morning in mid-March 2018 when I received an email from Benecia and Ernest, asking if I was open to documenting their baby’s journey through photography.
At 13 weeks in utero, their baby had been diagnosed with acrania, a fatal foetal abnormality. The baby had a partial absence of the skull and scalp and almost no chance of survival.
We met on a breezy Saturday morning at McDonald’s, East Coast Parkway, a few months later to plan the upcoming photographs. Benecia wanted a maternity session before the baby arrived.
She shared that although she and her husband knew the odds of their baby’s survival were stacked against them, they had decided to journey with him for as far as he could go. Together with their elder daughter, they did many activities, took plenty of photographs and created as many memories as they possibly could.
In their research, they had found a doctor in the United States who had worked with babies with this condition. If the stars aligned, there was a very slim possibility that their baby might have a fighting chance.
Hope. Faith. Trust. Those were the values I witnessed that day.
As a photographer for Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep for a decade, I had always refrained from prescribing advice. I am not a grief expert, nor do I have qualifications in counselling.
Yet I could not help offering Benecia one parting thought while trying desperately to hold back my tears: although it felt as if she was living through one of the worst moments of her life, she had the strength to get through it. One day, she would look back and realise the wonders of the human spirit.
I knew so because I had witnessed it before. Baby Elkan became the ninth baby I photographed through this work.
He arrived in September and was born alive. It is not often that I have the luxury of preparing for the arrival of a remembrance baby. Yet the emotional aftermath was familiar: I needed time to absorb the reality that I had witnessed the death of a baby, or the inevitability of it.
The hospital room held a sense of peace, insurmountable grief and a resolute acceptance that the family had less than a day with Baby Elkan before saying their final goodbyes.
I watched from a distance as the family picked up the pieces and moved forward. Life took over for all of us, until they shared in May 2020 that Baby Raphael had been born—healthy and chubby—in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic.
When it was socially safe to do so, I was invited to photograph the family again. Spending that Saturday morning with them was a salve for the soul and a song to the heart.
Their daughter, older but still as amiable, showed me the photo books her mum had made from our sessions. The books were well thumbed. She walked me through their pages, telling me about her other baby brother, Elkan.
One of the greatest gifts is seeing how remembrance photographs can bring a family peace and preserve the memory of a loved one whose existence was fleeting.