Picture of a paper that says : State of Montana
Governor's Proclamation "SUDDEN UNEXPLAINED DEATH IN CHILDHOOD AWARENESS MONTH"
Picture of baby Lucy sitting outside in the grass wearing a hat. She has her hands together, clapping and smiling while looking up. There is angel wings on her backside.
Picture of a pretty small urn of her ashes that has a little bird on it.

March is SUDC Awareness Month, and Montana is one of the many states that has recognized it as such in recent years.

SUDC Month

May 29, 2020 started out like any other day. I took my son to his last day of preschool before heading to work, blissfully unaware that my life was about to change forever. That afternoon as I was finishing up my day in the office I received a panicked phone call from my husband. Our 14-month-old daughter Lucy had taken her afternoon nap like usual, but when my husband went to wake her up she wasn't breathing. She was whisked to the ER but it was too late. My perfect, healthy, thriving daughter was gone. We left the hospital without our child, completely blindsided. She had been fine just a few hours earlier, as I saw in the video that my husband had sent me before her nap where she was laughing and saying "Mama!" There had been nothing wrong with her, how could this have happened?? Three painful months later we received Lucy's autopsy report, hoping for answers. Instead it read, "cause of death undetermined." After all of that, after doing a full medical investigation and an autopsy, after months of waiting, they still had no idea what had happened that day. She was gone, and that was that.

Fortunately, one person--who we didn't even know prior to Lucy's death--heard about our family and reached out. She introduced us to the term Sudden Unexplained Death in Childhood, SUDC. SUDC is a category of death affecting 400 children per year aged 1 to 18-years-old that remains unexplained after a full medical investigation and autopsy. It most commonly occurs while children are sleeping, but can also happen while they are awake. It is the fifth leading category of death in children aged 1 to 4-years-old in the United States, and yet people don't know about it. I had been a nurse for over nine years when Lucy died, and I had never heard of this. What's more, no one who we encountered throughout our loss--the medical community, the coroner and medical examiner, the police officers--knew that there was a name for this tragedy. Had it not been for the one person who reached out, we wouldn't have known that there were other families like ours, that there is a whole community of broken families who have suffered the same loss.

March is SUDC Awareness Month, and Montana is one of the many states that has recognized it as such in recent years. It is an important month to families like ours because people need to know about this. Research is needed to try to identify what is happening to these seemingly healthy children. Support is needed for families whose lives were changed in an instant. These things can't happen if SUDC families are the only ones who know about it and who share about it. We need others to participate in spreading awareness so that families like ours can have the opportunity to benefit from support services and to be able to connect with other families who get it. We need others to spread awareness so that more research can be funded so that hopefully one day these senseless deaths can be predicted and avoided. We need others to spread awareness so that we're not alone.

How can you participate in SUDC Awareness Month? You can visit the SUDC Foundation's website and www.sudc.org for more information on SUDC or to make a donation. You can share posts on social media. You can wear the SUDC colors of yellow and blue. You can be there for the families who have lived through the unthinkable and allow them room for their grief, regardless of how long ago their loss happened. They say it takes a village to raise a child, and I believe that it also takes a village to remember a child too.