Blackpool's Winter Gardens to host service to remember lost babies

The Special Baby Remembrance Service, organised by Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, is for parents whose babies were miscarried, stillborn or who lived for only a short time.

This year’s service is on Sunday, December 10, in the Baronial Hall in Blackpool’s Winter Gardens.

Organiser, Megan Murray, Bereavement Support Nurse at the Trust, said: “This year we are using stars as our theme. Families have an empathy with stars, it’s a connection they often feel with their baby through the gentleness of twinkling stars.

“The feeling that stars are there forever, watching over us.

“In the depths of despair bereaved parents may look to the sky and see a twinkling star and claim it as a symbol of their own.”

Christmas decorations have been provided for all families at the non-religious service by SANDS, the Stillbirth and Neonatal Death Charity.

Each will be tagged with a message from the organisation and people will be able to take them home or put them on the remembrance tree at the service.

Christmas trees, donated by Blackpool, Fylde and Wyre councils, will be placed in the baby areas at Carleton, Lytham, Poulton and Fleetwood cemeteries.

The tree at the service will be displayed at Carleton Cemetery.

Each family will also be given a Christmas bauble from the Trust on which to write their baby’s name as an act of remembrance.

Again guests can hang the bauble from either the Christmas tree at the service or take it home.

The event, which starts from 2.40pm, will feature music from 16-year-old Eve Murray who will sing Take That’s Rule the World and Hushabye Mountain.