“You Can Feel the Emotion”: Cameron-Willacy Alliance Helps Families Process Infant Loss
By Alisa Pierce

For those experiencing the grief of losing a child through miscarriage, stillbirth, or newborn death, the Cameron-Willacy Medical Society Alliance is helping create a comfortable space for healing and community during a special memorial butterfly release Oct. 16.

This will be the third time the Cameron-Willacy alliance has raised funding for and participated in the event, which the Valley Baptist Medical Center in Harlingen began over 10 years ago. During the gathering, families are invited to release a monarch butterfly in memory of their loved one and to stay afterwards for refreshments and time together.

During this year’s butterfly release, families will be given a special keepsake created by local artist and Cameron-Willacy alliance member Roberta Lee. During the group’s “Connect Over Coffee” event, where local alliance members meet informally to talk and share ideas, a member mentioned having an ornament that helped her remember the loss of her child.

Inspired, Ms. Lee created a collection of white ceramic butterfly ornaments, which have been donated to the Valley Baptist Medical Center and will be offered to families as a way to memorialize and honor their loss.

As with past butterfly releases, the Cameron-Willacy alliance will also provide a reception area for families’ mental and emotional support. During the gathering, parents can write the name of their lost infant or something they would like others to remember and place it on the “Never Forgotten” board. 

“We’re just so grateful for the opportunity to make a difference,” said Cameron-Willacy Medical Alliance President Rhonda Phillips. “Entire families can come process the loss of one of their family members. Just being there, you can feel the emotion in the room.”

Ms. Phillips says their chapter of the Texas Medical Association Alliance (TMAA) – a community of physicians, residents, medical students, and their spouses – was invited to participate after assisting the Valley Baptist Medical Center’s neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) for over six years.

She says when alliance members learned NICU nurses were sometimes using their own money to purchase clothes and other necessities for premature babies, the group quickly began donating, crocheting, and funding clothing and other essential supplies for some of Texas’ tiniest patients.

That work has included helping a mother of twins whose babies, born early, had to be cared for at different hospitals due to one twin being transferred to a tertiary care center for high-level intensive care, leaving the mother unable to be in both places at once. Providing support to the child who remained in Harlingen was one small way the alliance could help.

Ms. Phillips says the group has become such a staple that when neonatal supplies run low, the hospital often reaches out to the alliance for help.

“We decided to step in so these little intensive care babies, their families, and the nurses and doctors caring for them, knew they had support,” Ms. Phillips told Texas Medicine Today. “I’m always left feeling like I'm getting the blessing instead of them.”

The Neonatal Memorial Service will be held at the Valley Baptist Medical Center in Harlingen in the Woodward Conference Center on Friday, Oct.16. Participants will gather at 6 pm in the Woodward Conference Center for a ceremony before going to the side garden where they will release their butterflies.

For more information about TMAA, contact alliance executive director Tammy Wishard at (512) 370-1470 or via email.