Share-Parents of Utah

Share Parents of Utah has been helping bereaved parents since 1983. We are one of approximately 77 national chapters and support the Salt Lake, Utah and Tooele County areas (approximately 11,000 square miles). 

Share Parents of Utah is unlike many nonprofits. Our service is done discretely and quietly, is very personal, and is provided in a uniquely sensitive manner. People don’t want to talk about or accept the fact that babies die and that families are left with shattered lives. Many of our families do not feel that they are offered the same respect and honor of being allowed to share their experience with their family and friends.

Each week our volunteers enter hospitals and provide support to other broken parents. We sit with them. We cry with them. We hold and love their children. They are beautiful to us, not only because we love and miss our own children, but because no matter how small, their baby is their baby. Through our example, encouragement and true empathy, we empower and show parents how they can embrace this experience to its fullest by making and preserving memories of their time with their baby(ies) through dressing, bathing, holding, loving, kissing, photographing and taking molds, amongst others. We are giving them tangible memories that, otherwise, they may not even consider. No matter their “gestational age”, medically termed/titled type of death, or time allowed on this earth, we are there to facilitate, create and preserve lasting memories with families as the few hours/days, the only time they will get with their baby, quickly slips through their fingers. We go to honor their babies, preserve their memory and provide much needed dignity.  

Hospital visits are key to our volunteer work because we enter families lives on their worst days. The photographs we take are priceless and capture heartbreak as well as images that define the love between parent and child, siblings, grandparents and grandchildren.

Share Parents of Utah reaches beyond hospital walls to personal follow-up visits and phone calls. We offer a helpline for parents to talk to someone in their darkest hours.  We hold support meetings. Parents join other parents who held their own lifeless baby’s. Our conversations are heart wrenching and healing as families adjust to altered lives and new realities, realizing that life will never be the same again. It is a group that parents once never considered, but now defines who we are in this world. Together we help each other breathe and memorialize our babies. We serve, we cry, and we once again learn to laugh together.  We understand the pain because, we have held our own baby’s lifeless, precious body. It helps us breathe again by helping others and honoring the memories of our own babies. Often, we share our own experiences and encourage them to find us again on social media, at support group meetings, and join us at memorial events. We become a link to healing and future support.  

We hope to relieve the burden on our volunteers and expand our services both geographically and in scope of support. Like many aspects in life, our services are not widely recognized until one finds themselves coping with the tragic news of a young life that has passed. Sadly, the number of calls we receive is increasing as pregnancy death rates, as well as infant death rates continue to increase. According to data released from the Institute of Health Metrics, “Infant mortality rates have so significantly risen that the U.S. now ranks dead last on a list of 27 countries created by the CDC.16 Despite the cost of healthcare being higher in the U.S. than most other countries, a child in America is less likely to see his first birthday than a child from Korea, Israel or Hungary” (http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2016/10/05/maternal-infant-mortality-rates.aspx). One in four pregnancies ends with fetal death. More and more families are finding themselves experiencing infant and child loss.

Although we cannot control the healthcare system, we can control the amount of support provided to grieving families. Our goal is to educate others concerning infant and child death so that we can provide our services, support and help families grieve. We vidit hospitals with world class trauma centers to small rural hospitals with little infant care facilities. We visit families when they lose a child at home and we visit mortuaries where families learn of us following their child’s death.  Death does not discriminate. Share Parents of Utah understands infant loss and provides services to ease the pain for grieving family members. 

Share Parents of Utah is a quiet non-profit that changes and strengthens people’s lives. We understand and have lived through circumstances that often society does not want to talk about or even acknowledge. Our work is difficult and emotional, but rewarding and healing. We understand the importance of tiny lives and making and preserving tangible memories.