Subscribe to trusted local news

If you are accessing this story via Facebook but you are a subscriber then you will be unable to access the story. Facebook wants you to stay and read in the app and your login details are not shared with Facebook. If you experience problems with accessing the news but have subscribed, please contact subscriptions@thestrayferret.co.uk. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever. By subscribing, you can help us get the story right.

Subscription costs less than £1 a week with an annual plan.

Already a subscriber? Log in here.

Oct 2021

Last Updated: 10/11/2021

Community

Knaresborough mum tackles trauma of miscarriage through music

by Thomas Barrett

| 16 Oct, 2021

Clare-Lucy Pascall, who suffered a miscarriage in 2018, says writing music helps her come to terms with the experience. She calls the process 'creation from devastation'.

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."

Charity Corner: Harrogate baby loss charity stops families feeling ‘alone’

Ferris wheel, carousel and road train part of huge Harrogate Christmas offering

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.

Subscribe to trusted local news

Knaresborough mum tackles trauma of miscarriage through music

'An awful moment'

Read more:

Debut album