Public event funeral :/

[anitagreen]

Sorry if offends anyone however a girl I know has miscarried at 15 weeks pregnant. Very sad and distressing I know and she has my sympathy.
However this is now turning into a public event and I find it very very bizzare. She's raising £1000 to have a funeral done for the foetus because she didn't want the hospital to do that. I wasn't even aware you could take it home with you if this happened?
And now she's selling tshirts £25 for adults £15 for children to wear to the funeral and if your not wearing one your not allowed in?.
I feel sorry for her but I honestly feel like this has turne into a money making opportunity and I feel awful.

but my question is if she has the go fund me for £1000 surely she wouldn't need to sell tshirts?

Maybe the £1000 is for funeral costs (headstone, flowers, music, crematorium costs etc) and the t shirt costs is for the amount it is costing her to get them made (so non profit).

I will make a donation to sands 100%.

That’s kind of you and they do wonderful memory boxes that will go a long way to help parents who experience baby loss have things to remember their loved babies by.

I think with tiny babies they encourage parents to put things in the coffin like a blanket, teddy etc so there will be ashes. I agree that maybe your friend is trying to get the kind of recognition that some babies who died have had recently in the media. I can imagine it must be comforting to know that your baby was loved and is missed by lots of people. i always think there is something lovely about a packed church at a funeral and something very sad about a funeral with hardly any people there.

Grief makes people do weird things. I wouldn't have thought it was considered a 'death' at that age.

In your position, I would probably make a donation to an appropriate charity and leave her to it. I wouldn't get involved - because it sounds like a ridiculous charade - but equally, you can't tell someone how to grieve.

I get it 100% that everyone grieves different I fully feel sorry for any woman to go through that I had one at 17 and it sent me off the rails a little. I just hope this gives her some closure and she's doing it with good intentions and not anything else

I’m sorry but this is just setting off so many alarm bells .

I’m sure a PP was correct in saying you can’t have a ‘ funeral’ for a miscarriage as for a ‘funeral’ to take place you do need a death certificate which is only issued to stillborn babies.
In my experience funeral directors do not charge for babies funerals but I genuinely don’t know if a funeral director would actually be involved for a 15 week gestational foetus.
Grief manifests itself in so many ways but to tell people they have to wear a tshirt at a relatively high cost ( because you are never going to wear it again are you) and to say that you won’t get in if you don’t pay for a tshirt is quite quite preposterous. A funeral director would tell them that this is impossible as anybody can go to a funeral.
And , if you were having a funeral for a lost child would you not just want people there?
I’m sorry if I sound cynical - but I am. There’s something very very wrong with either this post or this ‘ funeral’. I’m not saying it’s a scam but it just doesn’t add up to me.

OP Iwouldnt go. I wouldn’t get sucked into the circus. It’s lovely of you to make a donation to SANDS as they do smashing work.

I lost a baby at 36 wks. And was horrendous. I think losing s much wanted baby at any gestation, is hard.
But I understand where you are coming from. I would feel uneasy being asked for money.
Yes funerals are expensive, but I believe it’s the very last thing that you can do. So you scrimp and pay for it. I hate go fund me for funerals.
Maybe ask for donations to a cause like SANDS (who are fantastic by the way). But not for the actual funeral.
Maybe that’s just me.
As for T shirts etc? I think that’s weird.
And as far as I knew, there’s not funerals for babies born under a certain date. There’s no death certificate, and in the eyes of the law, that baby didn’t exist. I’m not saying that’s right, but I think that’s the law?
I’m sorry for your friend’s loss. But I understand you feeling this way.

I'm not entirely sure of the ins and outs as we chose for the hospital to organise our baby's funeral but we were given the option of having the hospital chaplains and the people at the crematorium organise a service or we could take our baby home and organise our own funeral. I know people who have buried their miscarried babies in their garden and I know one lady who had a funeral and cremation for her baby who I think was born at 17 weeks. It was a long time ago that we buried our baby but we definitely didn't have a death certificate. I'm not sure if I signed anything to officially give permission for our baby to be buried by the hospital. We were given some leaflets about our options and a few weeks later we got a letter in the post inviting us to the burial service.

FYI. Very few funeral directors charge for an infant funeral. There will be the third party charges but I’m in the industry and our company don’t charge any fees, so it’s likely there will be minimal charge there.

T shirts? Yanbu.

We had a funeral and a burial for our baby at 16 weeks. The funeral directors dug the grave for us for free and our minister supported us in the service. We bought a casket from the funeral director which was actually an oak box made for a double ashes interment. I sewed ‘bedclothes’ for inside the casket and my DM made DS a tiny white gown to wear. I bought ribbons to lower the casket into the grave and my DF made a wooden cross for afterward. Friends filled the earth back into the grave for us when close family went for a meal afterwards.

A funeral needn’t cost much but may be essential in the grieving process. I personally don’t understand the huge fund raising. The cost was to our hearts and lives, not to our pockets.

Each to their own but surely this would be a private, family event if you wanted to have a funeral for a miscarried baby? I wouldn't buy a t-shirt or go to this 'event' unless she was a family member or extremely close friend. Donating to SANDS sounds a good idea as an alternative tho

If when my mother died my sister had sold tickets to the funeral, you can be damned bloody sure I wouldn't have given her a pass with the excuse 'that's her way of grieving'--and No T-shirt, No Admission amounts to selling tickets. I've known people who've become horribly short-tempered after a death, people who've suddenly taken to binge shopping after one, and people who suddenly began to take risks, so I know grief may manifest itself in unexpected ways but I've never heard that greed was one of them. I don't know if you could argue that this is disrespectful of the dead but it did cross my mind.

I don’t think you’re being U. The whole thing sounds faintly sordid, I’m afraid.

It sounds very strange, I get grief does strange things to people but selling tshirts to gain entry to a funeral surpasses that greatly.

I'd distance myself from the friendship and certainly wouldn't attend. Funerals are there to allow people to pay their respects, charging an entry fee to allow them to do that is beyond words.

Homebird8 the service you had for your DS sounds beautiful.

Does she maybe mean people without t-shirts can't be in the funeral as in can't have roles in the funeral so would be able to carry anything, get up and speak, etc but are still welcome to attend? It just seems so out there that I'm wondering if part of the message has been lost in the asking.

It seems to me, based on what OP has said, that - rightly or wrongly - she's pushing everything into this funeral and it sounds like it might be a coping mechanism for her. Look, my child was real, my child mattered, look at me doing this one last thing for him/her and look at how special I'm going to make it. There's an air of desperation to it. Mine was a plant, while I was on the diazepam. I bought a plant and I had it in my head that I had to prove myself by making it the best damn plant that had ever been, couldn't keep my baby alive but I would keep this fucking plant alive, you just watch. Of course it died, I was giving it half a bottle of Baby Bio every day and I kept forgetting to bring it indoors at night after taking it outside in the afternoons to get sunshine and fresh air but at the time it was so important to me.

I really hope she has someone good and kind looking after her.

@yorkshireyummymummy you don't need a death certificate to have a funeral. When my babies were born before 24 weeks we had no death certificate but the hospital still helped us arrange a funeral & burial in a shared grave. The only thing we paid for was the names on the headstone.

I'm not sure what gestation this starts at, but it's definitely the case for those nearly viability.

Homebird that sounds really beautiful and quite special I have tears in my eyes at that comment.
And she's defo made it clear if you do not purchase a tshirt and wear it you will not be allowed to be there. People have asked what the tshirt money is going on and she hasn't answered anyone. I think sands is an incredible charity and I've spoken to my dh about also making a donation so something good has come from this. I know a few people have said why doesn't she donate the tshirt cost to them to and have been met with empty replies so I think it's speaking for itself what this is about sadly

Our service was just right for us and brought comfort although the grief doesn’t go. Even years later there is still a gap where my boy should have been.

I’m inclined to feel for this woman and her family. I still don’t think the money aspect is to do with her loss though. People do get reckless with money sometimes in grief but they don’t seem to turn it into a business. What does the baby’s dad say?

In your position anita I wouldn’t buy a t-shirt and I don’t think I would go to the funeral either. I would offer emotional support in the days and weeks to come if it was accepted.

New update. Anyone that questions where the money is going is now banned from the funeral and then being messaged on Facebook with the threats to be attacked.
I'm quite glad I've distanced myself now it's really disgusting and vile what this has turned into I have two kids under 3 and have been told to watch my back for being friends with others who have asked if the tshirts money was being donated.

A shocking update. I think a conversation with your local police might be in order if she has threatened you. And anyone else threatened should do the same.

I certainly don't shock easily. I've been around far too long for that but
.
If I was paying £25 for a shirt I'd want to know exactly where the money was going.
What has she got to hide because it's clearly something.
As for the threat of attacks Id also advise going to the police.

Yanbu. This sounded off from the start. Sounds like she wanted money from the beginning.

A tragedy being used as a scam. This is what happens when grief collides with ‘reality life notoriety. Even before the update, it had become an unpleasant spectacle.

In fact people shouldn't be having to ask where their money is going. She should be saying. All proceeds will go towards SBCU
for example.
However I think we all know where the money is going though, don't we.
Aside from the abysmal threatening behaviour legally she's probably not doing a lot wrong. She's making t shirts her baby's fetus on and selling them. There is no law against that as far as I'm aware.
Morally though it stinks.