Noah Bryce Carey Squance

If you know Dane and I, I would hope you know us as a happy, content and family-oriented couple. I have believed that we are soulmates since the age of 15… while he took a little longer to convince, he has been the most loving partner I could wish for. Together, we have been blessed with our Harrison and Evie, the greatest loves of our lives. But ask either of us and we would have had a team of babies, in fact we have tried and lost a number of times.

What many will not know is that we were thrilled and excited to be expecting our 3rd longed for and much-loved baby in May 2023. We could not have been happier with this news, it felt like a true miracle and as we privately and cautiously moved through each appointment and scan our hopes for a successful pregnancy grew bigger and bigger. We imagined our life as a family of 5, we imagined the role of bigger brother and big sister for Harrison and Evie. We imagined what had always been missing for us, our final piece of the puzzle.

At Christmas we were almost halfway through the pregnancy and felt safe to share the news with the kids and our families. It all became real, we relaxed into the future and were just so…happy.

What we never expected was complications for our little miracle and that they would not be strong enough for this world and ultimately arrive to us, sleeping, at 28 weeks and 4 days on the evening of Friday, 3rd March. He wasn’t due until 22nd May 2023.

The grief of losing a child is something nobody should ever have to feel. This internal, silent pain that grips us day and night is unbearable. A little life with so much promise, surrounded by so much love and excitement and beautiful expectation should never be lost and nobody should feel as lost as we do as a family.

Noah Bryce Carey Squance, our beautiful 3rd baby. Our second son. Our miracle.

I was the lucky one because I spent 6 uninterrupted months with him. I nurtured him while he was a precious secret, never knowing anything about who he was, I got to love him, I got to protect him, and I got to know him. As the sweet flutters turned to precious kicks, I got to play with him. He loved music, he loved dinner time, he loved the sound of his siblings’ voices, and they loved his kicks and hiccups. He was calm at the sound of his dad’s voice. And he was a kind baby to me with minimal morning sickness and ankles that were never swollen, he was just a beautiful growing round belly.

What do you do when you meet a baby that you can’t keep, you can’t nurture and feed, you can’t bathe and change and comfort and you can’t take home? What do you do with all that love that was especially for him? You grieve. You cry. You question everything even though you know there are no answers that will make it better. You wish for something better because you know that a lifetime without him feels like a life sentence. The future is a hard one for us right now, its not what we had imagined only a few months ago. It is full of normalcy, routine, and responsibility and all without him. We are still so grateful for what we have, and we hold our growing babies close but part of us is empty…missing…without him.

To honour Noah, we have opened a GoFundMe to raise money for charities that support families through loss and vulnerable women through pregnancy and birth. If you would like to help us make a difference and have the means to do so, we would be so grateful for your contributions. We can’t fix what is broken but we can seek to channel our heartbreak into something meaningful for our beautiful baby boy who we miss every second of every hour of everyday…and always will.

We love you, Noah. We will love you, think of you and speak of you everyday until we can hold you again.

About the charities- we have currently selected Bears of Hope and My Sister’s Baby.

Bears of Hope supports bereaved families who have lost a baby through miscarriage, stillbirth, necessary medical termination, or infant death. They provide countless resources to families including grief counselling, support groups, care packages and resources to help families work in and through their grief. We received a care package from Bears of Hope and value the work that they are doing to help families with this invisible and ongoing pain.

My Sister’s Baby is a charitable organisation that supports doctors and midwives in lower- and middle-income countries to provide free healthcare to women who can not afford it for themselves. Our wonderful obstetrician, John Keogh, who has cared for and supported us through all our pregnancies, births, miscarriages, and the loss of Noah is an advocate for this cause. We know what exceptional care is thanks to John and would like to extend our support to this cause as a thanks to him and as a comfort to ourselves that these women will get the support they need. We can’t imagine what this would have been like without John, without the care we needed and first-class hospital facilities and midwives. Just $200 is enough to support one mother’s medical costs.