I promised my wife before she died that I would find the resting place of our daughter- I won't give up
A husband who promised his late wife he’d find their eldest child’s grave is still searching for answers decades later
Sean O’Grady, 66, promised his late wife, Susan, that he’d do his best to find the final resting place of their daughter, who was stillborn in 1982.
Doctors had to deliver Susan’s baby two months early after she was rushed to hospital with a painful headache. Susan had suffered from a pregnancy complication known as pre-eclampsia toxaemia, which caused her blood pressure to skyrocket and could have killed her.
Tragically, the baby, which was due two months later, could not be saved. At the time, staff at Tameside Hospital, in Greater Manchester, did not give any information about what had happened to the couple’s child. Sean and Susan did not even know the baby’s sex, or whether she was born alive, until nearly a decade later.
Sean said: “She kept asking. The hospital had said nothing to us. We tried the hospital a couple of days later, they didn’t say anything to us. Every time my wife asked they said ‘somebody will come and explain things to you’, but nobody ever did.”
The couple went on to have four healthy daughters. It was only after the birth of the couple’s fourth daughter, Margaret, in 1990 that Susan was able to read her medical notes, which revealed the baby had been a girl and was stillborn.
Tragically, Susan never found out where her baby, which she named Rebecca, was laid to rest. In 2003, Susan, who did not drink, passed away from kidney damage brought on by anti-rejection drugs she took following a liver transplant in the 1990s. She died aged 45.
Sean said: “All she wanted to do was put a flower on her grave. She was told, like I was, that the baby would possibly be buried with another person, and now there’s no record. Just for them to come forward and tell us something would help.”
Sean is determined to fulfil the promise he made to his wife on her deathbed, but despite years of searching, he has been unable to find any official records of Rebecca’s death.
He added: “I promised my wife I’d do my best to try and find her. It’s just hitting a brick wall every time. Every time I try to do owt, you just don’t get anywhere. You can’t really blame anybody, you can’t take it out on anybody, but you just feel it’s so unfair. At the end of the day, what I want to do is what I promised my wife when she were dying: that I’d do my best.”
Tameside and Glossop Integrated Care has been contacted for comment.