Helen Cook experienced a miscarriage 42 year ago, losing her first child.

With social norms dictating the death of a unborn baby wasn’t worth grieving over, she suppressed her emotions and focused on caring for her young family. 

“I was just told to get over it, get on with it, this is life,” she said. 

“But that grief just sits and simmers underneath.

“For the first 17 years, I was busy with the family.

“You suppress it, you try not to think about it, but of course it never goes away.

“I had three daughters, and I often thought about what would have been. Would it have been a little boy? What would he have been doing now? But you quickly squash it down again.”

It wasn’t until she had a conversation with another woman who had experienced a miscarriage that Mrs Cook was able to first accept her loss. 

“It just came bubbling out,” Ms Cook said. “I keep saying it was like a volcano erupting. I found I couldn’t just come terms with it, and I had to go back and grieve, and work through that grief.”

In 2010, she began attending the annual Ceremony of Remembrance, hosted by the Ballarat Bereavement Support Network. Mrs Cook did not see her role as a participant, but as a support person for her husband Graeme, who had lost a grandson. 

Her relationship with the event shifted in 2014, when she listened to Bill Weidner talk about his struggle with restrictions placed on grief. 

“He was saying how he wasn’t allowed to grieve, and all my hurt and anger and frustration bubbled up again,” she said. 

“At this stage of my life I’d taken up writing family histories, so I came home and wrote and wrote and wrote, got my frustrations out.

“At that point the miscarriage was 39 years ago, and it took all that time.

“It’s amazing, unless you work through something, you don’t genuinely heal.”

The Ceremony of Remembrance will take place on Monday at 6pm at the Ballarat Cemetery main entrance.

Participants have the opportunity to write a message on a balloon for their loved one.

Mrs Cook said the symbolism of physically holding a balloon tight during the ceremony and then letting it go at the end was potent. 

“You’re really letting your child go again, but the sky is filled with colour,” she said.

“The feeling is a sadness, because it’s a loss again, but now I’m ready and able to let go.”

“And they’re not going alone, it’s one of hundreds that are dancing around in the sky.”