‘I started pulling out all my hair’: Mother reveals how she turned torment of baby’s death into legacy
Kate Warhurst lost her darling daughter Elsie when she was only seven days old. This is the beautiful way she chose to honour Elsie, and to help other parents.
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Somewhere right now, there is a mother, or father, sitting in a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) wondering what on earth to do with their hands. They can’t hold their baby with them. Or swaddle them. Or bathe them. But they can use them to hold a picture book, to sit close by and read their child stories told the world over. About green sheep and owl babies. Wild things and very hungry caterpillars.
And some of those books will come in a beautifully wrapped parcel, with a pretty, flowered label that says “It’s From Elsie”.
Because Elsie may have only lived on this Earth for seven short days, but her imprint is mighty, with the book club that bears her name now delivering hundreds of books to NICUs around Australia.
For Elsie’s mother, Kate Warhurst, 31, creating Elsie’s Book Club is an ongoing act of love for her daughter, and a way of helping other parents who might be sitting by a humidicrib somewhere in an NICU somewhere, and wondering what to do with their hands.
And for Kate, it is also a way of keeping Elsie’s presence felt every time a parent unwraps one of Elsie’s books, her name still spoken aloud whenever someone, somewhere, opens a card and says: “It’s from Elsie”.
Elsie Jules was born on Tuesday, August 16, 2022. She was tiny, just 2.78kg, with strawberry blonde hair and a keen ear for her mother’s voice, lifting an arm when she heard it, an almost imperceptible movement that spoke of the deep connection between the two.
“When I was pregnant I spoke to Elsie, or sang to her, or read to her all the time,” says Kate, who lives in Brisbane’s eastern suburbs.
“I told the kids in my class (Kate is a prep and year 1 teacher) that she could hear me talking to them and us all singing together. They were almost as excited to meet Elsie as I was. Every month I’d tell them what size fruit she was in my tummy.”
After a textbook pregnancy marked by elation, an aversion to hot chips, and a nesting period watched over by Kate’s cavoodle, Teddy, “he was my pregnancy co-pilot”, Kate smiles, things went awry at 38 weeks and six days.
“I was at a routine midwife appointment and they found my blood pressure was very high. I had pre-eclampsia (a dangerous medical condition that causes high blood pressure and high levels of protein in the urine).
So it was decided that I was to be induced, and Elsie was born at 6.38am on August 16 at the Brisbane Mater Hospital.”
Kate remembers the time clearly. She remembers everything clearly. How utterly divine her daughter was. How she felt presenting Elsie to her family, her parents, her brother and his partner – “proudest moment of my whole life” – how patient she says Elsie was with her when breastfeeding didn’t come to Kate as easily as she’d hoped. And how, on the Thursday of that week, Kate began to feel unwell, achy and foggy with soaring temperatures. In a room filled with flowers from well wishers, and her tiny daughter in the bed beside her, Kate was told she had a retained placenta, and would need a procedure to remove it.
“I remember saying to a lovely woman called Ruth, ‘Can you please stay with Elsie while I have it done, because I don’t want her to be alone’.”
Wheeled back into her room after her procedure the next morning, Kate and the Brisbane Mater hospital staff noticed that her little girl’s colour was “off”.
Elsie was taken to the NICU, where it was discovered she had necrotising enterocolitis, a serious and sometimes fatal gastrointestinal disease that causes part of the bowel to die. Its onset is sudden, and there are no known preventive measures.
Elsie was cared for in the Mater’s NICU around the clock by a team of healthcare professionals who, Kate says “were the kindest, most caring and amazing group of people” including neonatologist, Dr Richard Mausling.
It was Mausling who delivered the news to Kate and her family on Monday afternoon that tiny, perfect Elsie was not going to survive.
It is testament to the sort of person Kate Warhurst is that in the recounting of this moment, she says: “I still feel so sad for him, that he had to deliver this news to us, I cannot fathom what that must be like.”
Kate’s reaction to his words were physical and visceral. “I started pulling out all my hair. It felt like I was on fire.”
She also felt utterly helpless.
“There were about 20 people with her, she was attached to so many machines, I couldn’t get to her, I couldn’t pick her up and I think one of the hardest things as a mum to feel is when you cannot help your child. She was on life support, and I thought I cannot leave her attached to that machine if she feels sick, if she is in pain, if she is suffering. I thought I had to take her off that machine. It’s the last thing I can do for her as her mother.”
Kate exhales, a long, slow breath full of longing, of missing her daughter. “I had time to tell her, ‘I love you, Elsie, I am so proud of you, you’re the bravest person I’ve ever known’. And I told her that I was so, so sorry I couldn’t help her.”
Ultimately and understandably, Kate was not in the room when Elsie was taken off life support. Instead her brother stepped forward, something Kate remains “forever grateful for”. She is grateful, too, for the neonatal bereavement team at the Mater.
“They stepped in for me and did all the things I couldn’t bring myself to do,” Kate says.
“I was so grateful, but so sad and I remember asking this very kind member of the bereavement team called Emma, ‘When will this grief go away?’, and she said, ‘You are already doing it. Grief is an ebb and flow and I’m so sorry that I can’t take it away’.”
About a week later, Kate went home to an empty nursery, holding nothing but that grief in her hands.
Grief is love with nowhere to go. Grief is a freezer full of lasagnes you don’t want to eat. Grief is being stuck between the before and after. Grief is being on maternity leave with no baby to look after.
“I was so stuck,” Kate says.
“I thought I’d go back to work while I was still on leave, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t be a mum and I couldn’t be a teacher, so what could I be, what could I do?”
At first Kate thought perhaps she could help other women returning home from hospital with broken hearts and empty arms. She thought maybe she could drive them home, or help them dress, or paint their nails, but her family thought it was too early, too raw, too much for her.
Kate says she knows they were right.
And then Kate remembered something.
She remembered tiny, brave Elsie in the NICU, fighting for her life, lifting her arm in response to Kate’s voice. She remembered how much she spoke to Elsie in the weeks and months of her pregnancy. She remembered singing “Shake your Sillies Out” to her, and she remembered reading to Elsie, turning the pages with the book balancing gently on her burgeoning tummy.
And she thought about all those hours in the NICU, and all those parents sitting by humidicribs surrounded by blinking lights and humming machines, wondering how to let their child know they are there.
“I had so many lasagnes,” Kate smiles, “too many lasagnes, so I started asking family and friends that, instead of a meal, could they give us books, and I also started buying my own books to drop off to NICU at the Mater for parents to read to their babies.”
The idea – as all the best ideas do – grew, with writer Rebecca Sparrow, who deeply understood Kate’s pain having lost her second child, Georgie, to stillbirth in 2010, contacting Kate and putting her in touch with Riverbend Books at Bulimba on Brisbane’s eastside.
A partnership was formed, and there are now more than 500 picture books in Elsie’s catalogue.
Customers can either order from Elsie’s Book Club in person or online and, once a week or so, Kate visits Riverbend to take home big boxes of books for delivery to the Mater’s NICU. And the Royal Brisbane Children’s Hospital NICU. And the other hospitals from interstate who have asked for them.
“My dad brings the boxes up the stairs, and I individually wrap the books myself and put the ‘It’s from Elsie’ label on.” Kate also ties the ribbons herself, many sent by other mothers who heard on the grapevine she was running out, and some from other bereaved mothers.
“They send me ribbons from the flowers they received in hospital,” Kate says, “they send me ribbons in their child’s name.”
There are thousands of books at Kate’s home that people have donated, and there will come a day when she is going to need much more help distributing them as word of Elsie’s Book Club grows, and more NICUs ask to join it.
It has given Kate Warhurst somewhere to put her grief, and a place to hear her daughter’s name. And a place to help others. Because Elsie Jules’s time on Earth was short, but her imprint was mighty. Alongside one of the picture books Kate recently unboxed was a handwritten note. It said, “Sixty years ago I had a little boy who passed. After he died he was never recognised, and his name was never spoken. This book is from my boy to your Elsie.”
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