Wedding gowns ‘offer solace’ as families grieve infants
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) — Donated wedding dresses are getting a new life through the NICU Helping Hands Angel Gown program.
Angel Gown is one of several bereavement programs offered at the University of Michigan Health-West. It’s a service no one ever wants to use, but families across the world continue to face the loss of neonatal deaths.
“The seamstresses take the wedding gowns apart. They take the beading off. They make gowns for NICU babies who have passed,” Cathy Miller, a registered nurse at Health-West, said. “It offers a lot of solace. It offers them dignity for their baby. They have something to dress their baby in.”
While Joshua Evans and his then-partner did not use Angel Gowns when they lost their little girl at 39 weeks, he told News 8 that a service like Angel Gowns offers a different way for families to grieve.
“It just allows the family to kind of see them, you see your kid and when you’re holding them, and they’re gone it’s hard to put in words the kind of reality of it,” he said. “But I think this opportunity to see them in that gown, to see them beautiful, to see them, the innocence that’s there I think it’s a wonderful program.”
After working with bereaved families for years, Miller decided to donate her dress which she now sees families at her hospital select after experiencing a loss.
“It just sat in my closet. It sat in a box. And when I came here and realized that there was a need for these dresses. I was like, well what better way could I put my dress to use than this,” she said. “Every time I choose a gown or I bring gowns to mom and they pick that and I see a little part of me going home with them.”
Gowns range in sizes from micro-preemie to full-term babies. Seamstresses attach a poem to each garment box and it reads:
“The world may never know if a flower doesn’t bloom or even pause to wonder if the petals fall too soon. But every life that ever forms or ever comes to be, touches the world in some small way for all eternity. The little one we longed for was swiftly here and gone. But the love that was then planted, is a light that still shines on. And though our arms are empty, our hearts know what to do for every beating of our hearts, says that we love you.”
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