‘I promised my late wife I would find our baby girl’s grave’ | Manchester News

A father has vowed to keep the promise he made to his late wife by “never giving up” in his search to find the grave of their eldest child.

While Sean and Susan O’Grady lost Rebecca in 1982, there is no official record of either her birth or death.

Mr O’Grady, from Hyde in Tameside, Greater Manchester, said they were not even informed whether Rebecca had been stillborn or had died soon after birth.

Now 66, he said he was “determined to carry on and find where she’s been buried so I can keep my promise” to Susan, who died aged 45 in 2003.

This article contains potentially distressing details about baby loss and grief. For a range of organisations and charities offering advice and support, please access the Action Line.

Mr O’Grady said his late wife had always been desperate to “put a flower down on [Rebecca’s] grave to remember her”.

The couple got married in 1979. Three years later, when Susan was nearly eight months pregnant, she became unwell with pre-eclampsia.

After she lost consciousness, Mr O’Grady said he was asked to make an unimaginably difficult decision in the face of losing both his wife and baby.

“I had to allow them to deliver the baby,” he said.

“They said the baby possibly could be born alive, but wouldn’t survive more than an hour.

“But they never came back to tell us if the baby was alive or if it was stillborn.”

Like so many parents who endured the trauma of stillbirth, very little information was shared with the O’Gradys.

While the couple went on to have four more daughters, they never forgot Rebecca.

In 1992, when Mrs O’Grady was being treated in hospital, she read through her medical notes.

While doing so, she read about Rebecca.

And yet there was no record of her birth, death or burial – something which weighed heavily on Mrs O’Grady for the rest of her life and still leaves her widower desperate for answers.

With one of their daughters, Mr O’Grady has spent many hours sifting through public records.

Clare O’Grady is angry and feels let down.

“It just feels really disrespectful,” she told the . “Almost like it wasn’t seen as a life that deserved a full record, and that mum and dad didn’t deserve the help that they should have been given.”

The 36-year-old said that while she believed people were doing what they thought was right at the time, the suffering of bereaved parents needed to be properly recognised.

“I think the people who suffered like my mum and dad deserve an apology or an explanation,” she said. “Recognition for what they went through and how it could have been better, and that we now know better.”

Before the mid-1980s, hospitals took care of funeral arrangements for stillborn children.

While procedures differed from hospital to hospital, it was common practice to bury infants in mass or shared graves.

Decades on, the final resting places for many stillborn babies are finally being discovered by their parents.

Public burial and grave records sometimes fail to provide the answers that are so desperately needed by families like the O’Gradys though.

In 1975, Lin and Eddie Bruchez, who now both 78 and live in the Gateacre area of Liverpool, had a little girl.

When she was about seven months pregnant with their second baby, though, Mrs Bruchez received some devastating news.

She said: “The nurse said ‘I suppose you realise the baby is dead?’… it was a shock because I didn’t know.”

Mrs Bruchez said she was told to go home, where the baby would probably “abort itself”.

Ultimately, she carried her baby for a further two months before going into labour.

“As it was being born, I went to look and she just turned my head away and said ‘Don’t look’, and then they just took it away,” she said.

Mrs Bruchez said she and her husband were then told to go home “and forget about it”.

The couple went on to have a daughter.

When they went to register her birth, though, the registrar asked them why they had not registered their baby son.

She told them they should have been given a birth certificate, a death certificate and a burial record.

Her questions and comments were the first time anyone had ever acknowledged what had happened.

In the nearly half a century that has followed, “every year on 15 August we always wish him happy birthday,” Mrs Bruchez told the .

The couple’s daughter, Joanne Bruchez-Corbett, has spent 20 years searching for her baby brother’s final resting place, with no success.

The 47-year-old believes there must be a paper trail or record somewhere, especially given the registrar’s questions and the family’s unusual surname.

She said: “It’s seeing my parents talk about how it hurts.

“I don’t want to see them in pain. I want to see them pay their respects and acknowledge he existed.”

Mr Bruchez said marking his son’s final resting place would mean so much.

“If nothing else, to get a bunch of flowers and say goodbye,” he said.