Time has not softened the memory of the hardest day of Matt Morrissey's life.
"It really has taken me this long to be able to come to terms with the events of that day," he says of September 3, 1997.
Mr Morrissey, now 48, was 23 at the time and expecting his first child with his then wife.
The pair had gone for a check-up with midwives, who told the couple the full-term baby had a "perfect heartbeat" and was in position. Staff wondered whether the pair might be back in hospital that night for the delivery.
Sure enough, Mr Morrissey's former partner went into labour that evening. That was when his "living nightmare" began.
"They pulled out the monitor and couldn't find a heartbeat. Then they went and got a second machine but still couldn't find a heartbeat," he recalls.
"Once we found out that he was sleeping, my wife was saying, 'Just please give me a caesarean, just please get this over with.'
"But the doctor was saying, 'You need to talk to her and guide her through this. She needs to give birth naturally, otherwise there is a higher risk that you will lose them both.'
About six babies are stillborn in Australia every day, affecting thousands of parents each year.
"You don't expect to be doing those things — I mean, I was just 23 years old," Mr Morrissey says.
'Have you written to your boy?'
The baby was a boy and the couple called him Patrick, as planned.
Mr Morrissey has since had the name engraved on a bracelet he wears as a tribute.
"I remember I was very much looking forward to being a dad. I'd gone through nine months of being there with my then wife and talking to her stomach."
Mr Morrissey has now resumed that communication — speaking directly to Patrick — in a different form, after a close friend suggested he pick up a pen and paper.
"She said to me, 'Have you written a letter to that little boy and just told him everything you would've liked to have said to him?'
"And that hit home.
"So I sat down and started a bit of a process, just saying all the things that I've needed to say to him and the way that I've missed him."
Mr Morrissey found communicating with Patrick, who would have turned 25 this year, transformational.
He realised he should share his breakthrough with others, especially fathers, who like him had lost a baby and perhaps not known how to express their grief, which he says never leaves.
So the man from Queanbeyan, near Canberra, who went on to welcome two living children and two stepsons into his family, posted recently about Patrick on social media, offering to speak with others who were hurting.
"It's been amazing and I'm a little bit overwhelmed by the responses that I've received, and the way that people have been prepared to share their stories so openly," he says.
"I've had people reach out to me who were our own friends who I had no idea had also gone through the stillbirth of a child.
"And I've heard from people who have gone through the experience at 16 years old. That hit me hard.
"I even had one gentleman who started to cry and I said, 'Please just cry.'"
Misguided belief in 'stoic' men
Mr Morrissey adds that, when Patrick came into the world as a stillborn baby in 1997, he was blindsided.
"I can't recall at any stage there being discussions about stillbirth and the possibility that you may go home from the maternity ward without any baby."
Psychologist Keren Ludski, who is Red Nose Australia's chief executive, says it took the community, including doctors, a long time to be able to speak about stillbirth — and much improvement is still needed, such as support for fathers.
"So historically, what we would see was that the dad would be OK for the first year after the death of a baby, but then, almost like once the mum was strong enough, the dad gave himself permission to grieve.
"And it was very much believed that women were our intuitive grievers and the ones who showed all of the emotion and wanted to talk about it … and that the dads were what we called instrumental grievers, who were doers and thinkers, and they would just do the things that needed to happen."
But Ms Ludski says grief affects each person differently, and many fathers whom her organisation has helped want to express their grief openly and emotionally.
Mr Morrissey says he has become one of those men, with a yearning to grieve Patrick in such a way — writing about his feelings and picking up where he left off years ago when he wrote his son's eulogy.
"And I titled those pages at the time 'You're still a dad'."
