Helping Families Through the Loss of a Child
July 2025
It is hard to think of a more devastating or traumatic experience than the loss of a child. Clinicians who choose to care for children strive to give them better, healthier lives, and most of the time we succeed. But that is not always possible. Not all disease is curable, and not all accidents are preventable. What does it mean to care for a family’s health in the context of unavoidable and indescribable loss?
ƹƵ Children's supports an innovative bereavement program to meet the emotional health needs of grieving parents and siblings. Called Love Always, the program embodies the kind of warm, caring patient experience that we provide. It also recognizes that “adverse childhood experiences” like the loss of a sibling puts the surviving children at higher risk of poor health later in life — if they aren’t supported by a caring adult.
In seven years as a child bereavement specialist with the program, Amelia Hayes, CCLS, MPH has worked with hundreds of ƹƵ families. She has a blunt assessment of how to make grief go away: “You can’t.”
Grief is like a ball inside of a jar, she tells families. As your life carries on, that jar gets bigger and bigger with all of your experiences. The ball never leaves or changes size, but it comes to take up less space. Life gets better, but the loss remains.
Together, Amelia and bereavement coordinator Mare Draper, who was previously a chaplain at ƹƵ and has 25 years of youth ministry experience, support approximately 120 new patient families each year who lose a child among our patients in the Delaware Valley. Even if the child was not at the hospital or under our care at the time they passed away, Amelia and Mare want to help families through the loss.
Mare Draper (left) and Amelia Hayes, CCLS, MPH
Love Always is part of the Partners in Advanced Care Team (PACT). PACT physicians are trained in pediatric palliative care, a medical specialty that helps families navigate difficult medical choices and works to give seriously ill children the best quality of life possible for as long as possible. Toward the end of that journey — if it does end — Love Always gets involved.
Amelia and Mare reach out to families through call, text, email, and home visits; send cards on the late child’s birthday and the first anniversary of their passing; hold an annual remembrance ceremony at the ƹƵ Estate and another online; operate a free weekend camp for children ages 8-17 who have lost siblings; run support groups for bereaved parents; and help connect families with mental health providers and other resources.
Although the program has certain established routines, like checking in with families at specific intervals after their loss, the support Amelia and Mare provide is fully tailored to a family’s needs.
Everyone processes grief in their own way, on their own time. For example, Mare and Amelia arranged for the mother of a neonate to return to ƹƵ for a visit, because it gave her comfort to be in the one location her child was ever alive. Amelia, who has a background in Child Life, often does individualized therapeutic activities with bereaved siblings while Mare provides space for parents to process their grief.
Families may lose contact only to reach out years later as siblings begin to ask different kinds of questions. One parent responded to the team’s outreach six years after her child’s death because she was finally ready to work through the grief.
Programs that support families’ bereavement after a child passes away are unusual in modern medicine, in large part because they operate at a 100% financial loss. At ƹƵ, we see this work as an essential and necessary to support the act of healing for parents and surviving siblings. Successfully coping with a devastating loss is one of the many aspects of Whole Child Health.
Families who lose a child will carry that ball of grief with them forever. We consider it a privilege to continue supporting our patient families as they process, mourn, and hopefully reach a place of peace.
To learn more about ƹƵ Children’s Hospital, Delaware’s Love Always program, email lovealways@nemours.org.
About Dr. Moss
R. Lawrence Moss, MD, FACS, FAAP is president and CEO of ƹƵ Children’s Health. Dr. Moss will write monthly in this space about how children’s hospitals can address the social determinants of health and create the healthiest generations of children.