Angel Babies & Perinatal Loss, The story behind Possum Portraits Going The Extra Mile

Possum Portraits was founded in Bayside in 2021
The timing was significantly influenced by COVID, in the sense that I had just moved to Melbourne with my Aussie husband and then 6 month old daughter in late January 2020. We had not been in the country 6 weeks when the first lockdown was announced in March. I knew no one and was being kept from making friends by continuous lockdowns for the better part of 2 years; so I decided to found a charity that was based on work I had been doing in Germany since 2018 (drawing infant loss portraits) in order to give myself a purposeful project and feel like I was working towards a goal.
I first came to infant loss portraiture through the encouragement of my sister, who is a midwife.


Pregnancy and Infant Loss in Australia

-Over 110,000 families affected by perinatal loss each year in Australia
- That is 6 stillbirths and 2 neonatal deaths a day, while a miscarriage occurs every 3.5 minutes
-This is despite Australia having one of the three top performing healthcare system in the world
- 1 in 4 pregnancies ends in loss; which means that far from being uncommon, the reason we don’t commonly hear mention of it is because perinatal loss is still shrouded in social taboo
- This attitude is unhelpful to grieving parents, who often don’t feel seen, heard or supported in their needs after bereavement


Possum Portraits’ Operations

- we supply hospitals across Australia with free grief resources for bereaved parents
- midwives and other caregivers refer parents to our continuity of care service after loss
- we specialise in free commemorative keepsake portraits of so-called “angel babies”. This is a grief support service no other charity in the world offers
- parents who wish to receive a portrait apply through our website and supply reference photographs of their baby to base our portrait on. In concert with parents, our professional portrait artists then design a portrait for parents which will allow them to remember their baby in a way that meets their wishes. For example, parents may only have poor quality phone pictures of their stillborn or only have photos that show their baby connected to medical equipment. Our hand-drawn portraits allow for details present in photographs to be left out, or for various reference photos to be combined in a single portrait.
- This approach allows us to give parents family portraits with their baby when they may have no such photos in real life, or to show angel babies with their surviving siblings, which we get asked to do often. I’m short, a portrait offers many commemorative possibilities beyond photography and is a crucial alternative for parents to have access to after loss
- we pay our artists for the specialist and highly skilled nature of the work that they do. As an organisation, we are mainly funded by donations.
- we also run a training program in compassionate perinatal bereavement care for midwives which is endorsed by the Australian College of Midwives
- our first academic research study with Monash University is due to commence in July 2023


Why commemoration matters
- keepsakes have been shown to improve mental health outcomes after perinatal bereavement
 
www.possumportraits.org