After Jessie's son was stillborn, she was allowed to take him home for three days.

Jessie was 30 years old when she fell pregnant for the first time. It wasn't a planned pregnancy, but it was one happily welcomed by her and her partner, Andy. After all, they loved each other deeply and they were entering that period in life where friends were having children and they were starting to consider settling down together. 

Jessie describes her pregnancy as a time of immense optimism, of her and Andy filled with "dreams and desire for the future." 

The couple landed on his name: Monty Marchet. A name they agreed had a great ring to it and would surely mean that he would grow up to be a brilliant playwright or writer one day. 

By the time Jessie went into labour, there was no real indication that anything was wrong. Monty was a week overdue and the hospital had read what Jessie describes as the "riot act", telling her that if her pregnancy carried on another week, she would have to be induced. But as it stood then, there was no real cause for concern. 

It was 7pm when her water finally broke. Jessie was watching Law & Order with Andy and doing some yoga in front of the TV. Once they realised that Monty was surely on the way, Jessie headed straight to bed in order to prepare for the marathon of labour. 

It wasn't until one o'clock in the morning that the contractions started coming harder and faster and the couple headed to Royal Hospital for Women in Randwick, driving through the pouring rain. 

Even then, the progress of her labour felt natural and fine. 

Image: Andy and Jessie, pregnant with Monty. Supplied. 

They settled into a birthing suite with a midwife and as the labour intensified. Jessie was handling the pain but after a few too many hours had passed, she began to feel frustrated, as though something was wrong but she couldn't place what. 

"It did get to a point where I remember starting to feel like 'This feels a bit weird, it's regressing.' I was in the bath and it just didn't feel like it was progressing. I started to feel a bit agitated," Jessie says. But her doula assuaged her fears, telling her that it was going to be okay, that the delay was natural and the progress of labour didn't always happen in one direction. 

The first signal they had that something might be wrong was when the midwife placed an ultrasound monitor against Jessie's belly to measure the baby's heart rate and found that it was slowing in a way the team weren't comfortable with.

"My son's heartbeat was not coming back up... they detected that there was something wrong and we didn't know what it was."

They called an emergency team to attend. Jessie was placed in a wheelchair and rushed down the hallway into the labour ward and an obstetrician entered with a medical team, telling Jessie that they were going to have to get Monty out quickly. 

"It was very shocking, very dramatic," Jessie recalls, her voice breaking. 

The team performed an episiotomy and applied suction as well as plunging forceps in to retrieve her son. "I beared down and I did push him out in two pushes. And I saw him as he came out and he was massive – he was ten pounds."

The baby was rushed to a crash cart and he was given adrenaline – but his heart would not start again. 

"I didn't know that he had died. I just felt relief because the labour was over – I didn't know that he died. I just thought they were helping him in some way," Jessie cries as she recalls the horror of the moment she was told what had happened.

"We'd been just a minute, a moment, and the obstetrician came back and she just leaned into my ear again. She said, 'I'm very sorry but your baby has died'. And she gave him to me and I just held him and he was all wrapped up and he was beautiful. And then I just screamed." 

There was no reason that it should have happened, the hospital conducted their investigations in the weeks to come but there were no answers to find. In the end, nobody knew why Jessie's son's heart stopped beating. 

Jessie and Andy were moved into a room on the postnatal ward. 

"We had rooms on either side of us with mums and babies and families all celebrating but we were in our room with Monty, who was not sleeping and he was dead. He was in his little perspex cart that you get in the hospitals."

The couple were given sleeping pills to make it through the night and Jessie slept. But when she opened her eyes the next morning, she woke up into a cold and harrowing moment of grief. 

"Then the next morning, I rolled over and I could see Monty and the sun was rising behind him and I just really looked into his face and that was when I really came to the fact that he was dead." 

Over the next two days, the couple were visited by a stream of friends and family, who shared in their tears, swore, shouted, and held them. It was an intense period of sharing their horror with the people they loved the most, which Jessie describes as "beautiful and profound". But, by the end of the second day, they were starting to feel stuck in their trauma. It wasn't until a social worker visited the room that Jessie and Andy were given the opportunity to go home, as a family. 

"She said to me that we could take his body home. And that's what changed everything for us. 

I remember the excitement that I felt – I remember the thrill. It was a thrill because I had something to do that was productive. I could be a mother for a little while longer – I could do something that I'd always planned on doing." 

Jessie says that she'd never heard of the opportunity to take a baby home after death before it was offered to her but they immediately felt it was the right decision. Jessie's mother and best friends hurried back to the apartment to clean up, make the beds, stock the fridge, and place vases of flowers around their home. 

Meanwhile, Jessie and Andy set about doing some of the things that new parents are supposed to: they fitted the car seat and placed his swaddled body in it. They took Monty home and settled in with their son. 

And they sat with him for days in their home. 

"It felt wonderful. I honestly couldn't imagine going back to an empty house. I loved him. He was my son, he was a part of our family. Why would we go home without him? 

Listen to Mia Freedman discuss stillbirth on No Filter with her friend, Rebecca Sparrow. Article continues after podcast.

It felt on the one hand that we were in some sort of profound experience because we were with death... And then on the other hand, it just felt completely natural and normal. Because he was my son. He had a name. He was fully-formed. He had clothes on and he was swaddled in a blanket and in his bed." 

Jessie held Monty for hours, his soft skin pressed against her. His body was cold but otherwise he felt perfect, "just like feathers" she says. 

She says she wasn't thinking straight in her grief and, at one point, she pulled a hot water bottle from the small of her own back to press against Monty, to warm him up. But somebody noticed and gently placed the water bottle away from his body, reminding her that they had to keep him cold. 

"I was a grieving mother... those things might sound shocking to other people but for is, it was just part of what we were navigating together... Holding him, rocking him, singing to him, felt very, very natural." 

Her friends and family came to visit them, stroking Monty's cheek and greeting him like they would any other newborn. Some of their children came, too, and the adults would explain why he was cold. 

In the times when she needed to rest, Jessie recalls moments when she would take Monty away to the bedroom alone and gently lay his body on a sheepskin rug, falling asleep beside him. 

However, after a few days, Jessie knew that their last goodbye was fast approaching. Monty's body was changing and in New South Wales, bodies are only permitted to be kept in the house five days past death. The funeral home were kind in what they offered the grieving couple, saying that they could take Monty's body into their care the day before the funeral, cooling his body down in the mortuary and then bringing him back to the home so he could be close in the hours before he finally left them. 

"That felt really good, and having him away for a night was so good, it was kind of a practice run, to be able to knock back the beers and talk about the next night and how we were going to do it and how we felt about the funeral and how we were going to give our final goodbye. It was a conversation not just with my partner, but with our closest friends who were in the apartment at the time." 

Image: Jessie. Supplied. 

The night before the funeral, two funeral directors came to their door, having carried Monty's body in a coffin up three flights of stairs. Jessie remembers every detail: from the fact that the directors waited until exactly 8pm, the pre-arranged time, to knock on the door, to the beautiful cloth they had placed on his coffin. Jessie and Andy were given the opportunity to say goodbye but they were warned that Monty's body would look very different from when they last saw him. Jessie said that was okay – they wanted to look at him again. 

"I was not prepared to be honest for what he did look like. It looked like they put makeup on him but his eyelids were really blue and his lips were very black. And mostly I remember feeling like, 'Why on earth would you put that makeup on?' but it was just the way that his body had settled. 

I did not want that to be my lasting memory of him – so we gave him a kiss. And we put the lid back on. And we left him in the coffin that night." 

Jessie recalls, weeping, that a friend came to the apartment while she slept with Andy, to stay in vigil next to Monty's body, praying and meditating to ensure that he wasn't alone that night. 

At the funeral the next day, 100 people gathered to mourn the loss of their son – the lead cellist of Sydney Symphony Orchestra, a family member, played a piece. And then, suddenly, it was time to say goodbye for the last time. Jessie and Andy said their final words to Monty in the hearse before his body was cremated. Twenty-one years later, his ashes still sit on a mantelpiece in Jessie's bedroom. 

Jessie recalls that after the funeral, coming back to their empty home, she began to feel enveloped by darkness and grief and entered the most torturous period of her life. Nothing was normal anymore but she found little recognition or awareness in the world around her for what she had been through. Everybody else had to return to their lives – but Jessie found that she couldn't.

"Your heart is just broken and your identity is so confused. Because you're a mother but you're not mothering, you don't know where to put your motherly love." 

Her loss was too much to bear. Jessie found that she couldn't even watch TV. 

"All the ads, the frickin' tissue ads, the 'softness of a baby's bottom', every ad you see is reminding you that your son's not here. The only people that know he existed is that small community you have." 

She describes her grief as a "long dark night" that dragged on for months and months. She self-harmed at times and considered ending her life but her friends and family always ensured that she felt supported and loved. Jessie says she was told by a friend that grief never disappears – but you do grow around it. 21 years after Monty's death, she says she still cries for him but she knows the experience has changed. She kept his baby things, his clothes, his cot, in the house for a very long time. 

Jessie is now 51 years old and has two daughters, 17 and 10 years old. Looking back at this deeply painful period in her life, she says that one of the most startling realisations she had was the marked need for grief to become something shared by a community, something that is spoken about and wrapped around and doesn't have to happen in private. 

Watch: The 5 Things Nobody Really Tells You About Grief. Article continues after video. 

Besides working in community care, Jessie is now an advocate and runs the Dying to Know Day campaign, an annual event that empowers adult Australians to plan for their choices around end-of-life. Every year, the campaign puts an invitation out to the Australian community to consider holding an event and encouraging daily conversations about end-of-life. 

The campaign has produced initiatives like 'death cafes', where community can gather to talk about the realities of death over tea and cake. Jessie is also particularly proud of the campaign's 'coffin clubs', that brings seniors together to decorate flat-pack coffins for themselves. She says that those activities can be wonderful, funny icebreakers in order to have deeper conversations about the organisation required around death. 

Having experienced such a sudden and devastating loss, Jessie now looks to empower people to approach death and prioritise personal choice, even if those choices may seem unconventional to others. She wants people to have the opportunity to own the experience of making decisions after death, to feel capable and triumphant in the wake of tragedy. 

"Death and dying is a social experience with a medical element, not the other way around," she says. "We all go through it together, so it's helpful to have the kind of mindset of 'I don't need to hide this experience from other people. I can share it with other people. I can say I want my mother's body at home with us. I want to live next to her – or my father – I want to take my time.'"

In terms of the opportunity to take Monty home that Jessie was given 21 years ago, Sharon Kirsopp, a bereavement counsellor from the Royal Women's Hospital Melbourne, tells Mamamia that the practice has become more common in recent years.

Kirsopp says that she's proud of the opportunities that are being offered to bereaved parents today, such as making memories with photographs, handprints, and footprints following stillbirths, miscarriages, and infant death. The Royal Women's Hospital also provides 'cuddle cots' that allow parents to keep babies cool through the grieving process. 

"It cannot be understated, the impact and the gratitude that the family have just to have that extended time with their baby in their own home, in their own environment, and outside of that hospital setting," Kirsopp says. However, she also acknowledges that these options are not offered nation-wide and she would like to see them become standardised practice. 

Thinking about the hospital social worker that spoke to her after Monty's death, Jessie says she still feels incredibly grateful. But she also feels strongly as though it should be standard practice to be given that opportunity, even if some mothers do not choose it. 

"Of course [the social worker] should have said that to me. In what world would that not be said to a woman? Given what we know about mothering and fathering and parentage and our children and what makes us healthy and whole, why on earth would separation be the way to go? 

I can't imagine a world where I didn't go home with my baby. I shouldn't feel lucky that she said that to me – I should have expected that." 

Jessie now runs the Dying to Know campaign and she appears on the SBS Insight program, 'Let's Talk About Death', available now on SBS On Demand. 

This article was updated to include comment from Sharon Kirsopp. 

Elfy Scott is an executive editor at Mamamia.