Parents advocate for mandatory bereavement leave after child loss
Photo I Courtesy of State House News Service
Rep. James Arciero (D-Middlesex) speaks about Sudden Unexplained Death in Childhood and his bill to offer bereavement time for parents at a briefing in Nurses' Hall on Monday.
The feeling of losing a young child is unimaginable, parents said Monday as they pushed for mandatory bereavement time and sought to boost understanding of a rare category of childhood deaths.
"When time stops for bereaved parents, we need to give them the time they need to process and grieve," mother Lynn Sallet said at the event in Nurses' Hall.
Under a Rep. James Arciero bill (HD 3789), employers would be required to authorize up to 10 days of bereavement leave after the death of an employee's child. The time could be used consecutively or non-consecutively within 12 months. It would apply in the cases of biological, adopted, step, and foster children, Arciero said.
March marks Sudden Unexplained Death in Childhood (SUDC) Awareness Month, recognizing deaths of children 12 months or older that are still "unexplained after a thorough case investigation" including an autopsy, according to Arciero's office. Five hundred children were affected nationwide in 2023, including 247 between the ages of 1 and 4.
Dr. Kristen Dillon described hugging her daughter, Junie, not knowing it was for a final time.
"On the day that Junie died, so many parts of me died, too. The woman, and the mother that I was, was gone. As was my understanding of the world," Dillon said.
She said she could not face returning to work and needed four months to process what had happened. She later founded Junie's Place, a Chelmsford-based nonprofit that offers no-cost bereavement support for deaths that occur in pregnancy, infancy, and childhood, along with stillbirths.
Dr. Erin Bowen, a pediatrician and vice president of the SUDC Foundation, said her bereavement leave was initially declined by her employer after the death of her 17-month-old son Connor. She was navigating personal grief while also caring for her surviving 3-year-old daughter.
While her leave was finally approved after a long appeals process, it struck her that the "significance" of her loss had not been recognized.
"After facing the most unimagineable loss, parents should not have to fight for bereavement leave, as well. There is no amount of time that would pass when it would be easy for a bereaved parent to return to work," Bowen said.
Bowen and the other parents at the State House event called for passage of the Arciero bill, which has attracted a bicameral, bipartisan group of 20 cosponsors including Senate President Pro Tempore William Brownsberger and House First Assistant Minority Leader Kimberly Ferguson.
After Sallet's son Carson died unexpectedly at the age of 17 months, her leave was approved, and her husband's employer also granted a month of bereavement time "to say goodbye to our son" followed by a flexible schedule.
"The death of a child is an unimaginable, profoundly devastating, life-changing loss," Sallet said. "And no parent should be forced to choose between keeping their job or mourning their child."
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