Gaiko on mission to help grieving parents
After the loss of her baby and the subsequent emotional turmoil she went through, Vivian Gaiko is determined to offer support to parents like her.
When Vivian Gaiko, heard her daughters first cry in 2014, she was happy. However, her happiness was short-lived; 16 days later her baby died.
As much as she had a supportive family, she really didn’t quite get someone who identified with this unimaginable journey.
So, she kept quiet, pretending to be okay, but she was suffering. This drove her to a dark path of suicide attempts as she just couldn’t get answers and was wondering why this happened to her.
“I attempted suicide twice, but both attempts backfired. Ashamed of my actions I decided never ever to try such a thing. However, I hadn’t recovered fully from the loss,” says the Medical Laboratory Science and Technology graduate.
Early 2016, a lady she knew died by suicide after losing her twins. That incident got Vivian thinking perhaps if she had said or done something or even just shared her own experience, maybe the lady wouldn’t have died.
After that, she started reaching out to mums in distress after a miscarriage, stillbirth or infant loss on a Facebook page, Parents with Angels in Heaven, and allowed them to share their pain in a safe space, having needed that herself two years back.
“I bumped on this page one day and I couldn’t believe how badly grieving parents needed a shoulder to lean on.
This is when I started encouraging them and sharing my story. Because of this, some would refer others to me and the number of these women started growing,” she explains.
Advocate for parents
The need for a community of support, judgment-free safe space for grieving parents to share and connect, and the need to shatter the stigma and break the silence surrounding pregnancy and infant losses were the motivation to start an organisation she named Empower Mama Foundation.
The organisation offers platforms where bereaved parents can find emotional and social support, a safe space to share their feelings and thoughts, feel accepted as parents and honour the life of their child.
“We also raise awareness in our communities on the impact child loss can have on families and communities and the need and benefit of effective bereavement support.
This is slowly helping in shattering the stigma. We also offer awareness workshops customised for various community groups; for bereaved parents, at workplaces and even religious communities such as churches.
Our goal is to advocate for parents, who sadly find themselves in this incredibly hard grief journey, to receive respectful care and support right from the hospital setup, to the homes, workplaces and communities where they are,” she says.
Navigate grief healthly
Vivian adds that as a way of ensuring they attend to all those who reach out for their help, they offer emotional support to bereaved parents on phone call, hospital visit or home visits.
They also do one-on-one and group support where they meet physically. Currently, they have partnered with Mama Toto Childbirth and Educative Services to offer an online group support given restrictions as a result of Covid-19.
In the support groups, parents are allowed to be who they are and where they are at in their grief journey, to express their grief and talk openly about their feelings and thoughts, to honour and remember their babies without feeling judged and to find ways and tools to navigate grief healthily, move forward and walk alongside other parents navigating a similar journey.
“Pregnancy is a journey normally expected to end blissfully with a child in the arms of their parents.
However, it’s a sad reality for parents who lose their children during pregnancy, during birth or even after birth.
Statistics of the rates of these losses are there, but behind these stats is a family grieving the loss of their precious baby, of crushed dreams and future.
Sadly, in our country pregnancy and infant losses are dismissed and invalidated and many parents suffer in silence due to the shame and stigma surrounding this kind of loss.”
Though child loss affects both parents, Vivian says that the organisation mostly focuses on women because grieving styles are not the same for men and women.
She says women are more outspoken, express and share their feelings as opposed to men. Because of this, it was easy for them to reach the women first.
Positive impact
“We believe that when a mother/woman is informed, she in turn informs her spouse, her family and community around her.
In our context of child loss grief support, these women are empowered on what the grief they are going through is, allowed that space to grieve and honour their child, learn how to advocate for themselves in a community where there is still stigma and how to compassionately support others should they need/want to.
We actually don’t majorly focus on women and our space is open even for the grieving fathers and we have had a few engage with us,” she explains.
Though for the last four years she has seen a positive impact since some of the women who’ve been through their support groups are now supporting others, who in turn support others, it hasn’t been a walk in the park.
Lack of resources has made some of their community awareness projects stall.
However, she is determined to move on at whatever cost to ensure that their wish and hope is granted.
Besides running the organisation, Vivians is a perinatal mental health advocate and partner at Perinatal Services where they engage, educate, advocate for and promote emotional and mental well-being of pregnant and new parents. She is also a perinatal loss counsellor.
