Knaresborough mum-of-three and musician Clare-Lucy Pascall is releasing an album of songs about the trauma of miscarriage.
Baby Loss Awareness Week, which is taking place for the 19th year, aims to offer families who have suffered pregnancy and baby loss a supportive space to share their experiences and feel they are not alone.
Ms Pascall, who suffered a miscarriage in 2018, said writing music has helped her come to terms with her experience.
“It sounds terrible, but I call it creation from devastation. That’s where it comes from. When you’ve gone through trauma, creating something worked so well so I could come to terms with it.”
‘An awful moment’
In 2018, Ms Pascall went for her 12-week scan, which she said had “always been the fun part” of pregnancy as it had been the first time she and her husband Harry could see and hear their new child.
But the couple were dealt the devastating news that the baby had no heartbeat.
She said:
“It was a weird, awful and a nothing moment. I could see her. That was the hard part. She still looked like a baby.”
Ms Pascall then had to go through months of uncomfortable hospital procedures.
“My body didn’t play ball. I spent April to July going to hospital visits, having scans and doing things you don’t want to do when you know you’re not having a baby.”
A naturally outgoing and gregarious person, Ms Pascall said she was “physically speechless” and unable to speak to anyone about what she’d been through.
“I didn’t give myself a chance to grieve the loss. I locked it away and put it on the backburner. I couldn’t cope with it.”
“At the same time I was doing everything i normally do, and not telling anybody.”
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Ms Pascall said her husband Harry was “her rock” throughout the period but it took a year before she was ready to go to a counsellor to help her through the emotional trauma.
To remember her daughter, she takes flowers to Stonefall Cemetery, which is where babies that have miscarried are cremated.
“Remembering sounds like such a random thing when you didn’t get through a pregnancy. But I could see the scan, she was there, I knew she existed.”
Debut album
Ms Pascall’s debut album, which is called “Dear Friend, Who Am I?” will be released on Amazon, iTunes and Spotify.
She said:
“In my music and my songs, she comes out in them all the time. It feels like an imagined memory, what it would have been.”
Ms Pascall will hold an album launch party at Fashion House Bistro on November 8th — the date that would have been her daughter’s third birthday.
“The 8th was her due date, so it’s quite a big thing.
“It’s awareness and acknowledgement [about miscarriage] but also about the creativity that has risen from that devastating loss.”
Listen to her album here.
