Something felt very wrong in the room that evening when Jennifer Stratton went to check on her baby, half an hour after putting him down.
It’s only now, 10 years after losing him, that happy memories of days with Dexter take precedence over the heartache and trauma of how cot death claimed his life.
Dexter – a fifth son for Jennifer and husband Iain – was born two weeks early in June 2012, weighing a healthy 8lb 2oz.
His big brothers, Kyle, Cameron, Innes and Harris – then aged nine, seven, five and three – doted on the little one who lit up their lives.
“He was such a happy baby,” said Jennifer. “I know everybody says that – but he was. He was constantly giggling and always sticking his tongue out. The boys used to put music on after dinner every night and we would all dance. He used to love that. There would be a big competition on to see who could get him to giggle the most. He was just such a happy, easy-going baby.”
Then, on a September evening in 2012, after Jennifer had waved Iain off on his first business trip to Birmingham, the family’s world was to change forever.
“Dexter had been a bit bunged up that day, like the start of a cold, but otherwise he was fine in himself,” she said.
“I put him down at 6.30pm. When I went up to check on him at 7pm, the room was very dark. The room felt wrong. I lifted him. He was already gone.”
A frantic Jennifer dialled 999 and attempted CPR on her lifeless 13-week-old baby boy until paramedics arrived and took over.
Her parents collected her other four sons to allow Jennifer to accompany Dexter to hospital. During this time, Iain was on a flight south, oblivious to the tragedy unfolding at home.
“They kept working on him until we got to the hospital,” she went on. “The doctors continued for a while. It must have gone on for 45 minutes between me starting and getting to the hospital, and the doctors calling it.”
On landing at Birmingham International Airport, hospital doctors were able to make contact with Iain to break the devastating news of the loss of his youngest son.
Although Police Scotland offered to arrange for Birmingham officers to drive Iain to the border where they’d meet him, it was deemed more practical to board the first flight home the following morning.
Back home in Auchtermuchty, Fife, nobody other than police were permitted entry to the family’s house.
“Forensics had to go in and take things away. We weren’t back in the house for three days,” said Jennifer.
“The boys were still asleep in my mum’s house when I went to the airport to meet my husband. When we got back, we just sat them down and were honest with them. We told them Dexter had become poorly and the doctors tried really hard, but they could not save him and he died.
“Losing a child and dealing with your other children and seeing their reaction to that was so difficult. I felt like I had to be strong for the boys, and I very much held it together when I was around them. When the boys were in bed, I did cry and get upset, but I very much wanted to be supportive of them and be sensitive about how they were feeling. I knew they’d heard things going on that night.
“It’s only very, very recently that my oldest son has said he remembers police coming to the house and that I then went away and I was crying. You’re not aware at the time of just how much they’re taking in.”
From the moment Jennifer had to leave the hospital without her baby, any arrangement to see him had to be made through police.
“It was like jumping through hoops,” she said. “We had half an hour with him, then he was taken to Glasgow. It was five or six days before he went to the funeral home. I think that was one of the hardest parts – leaving him, knowing we were not allowed to go back. There were not all these cuddle cots and cold cots where people get to spend longer with their baby. We did not have that option. That would have meant so much to us. After he died, we got to see him once at the hospital morgue and once at the funeral home – and that was it.”
Within a week, the police family liaison officer had put the Stratton family in touch with the Scottish Cot Death Trust.
The charity reached out almost immediately, guiding them through the process of the post mortem and how events would unfold with the police.
Although Jennifer and Iain at no point felt that police were treating them with suspicion, officers had to take statements from them individually, and they and their children were barred from their home and their belongings.
“They took bags of things out of the house from Dexter’s cot – blankets, teddies, dummies and things,” said Jennifer.
“We live in a small village, and gossip travels. The police were outside our house for three days. There was a rumour in the village that our children had been taken off us. People do not appreciate what you go through with the police. That was hard on our children, as well. They were not allowed their things, even their clothes. The Scottish Cot Death Trust helped us navigate through that.”
Soon after Dexter was laid to rest, a home support worker from the charity visited the family, giving Jennifer the freedom to open up.
“She was really good. I could openly speak about Dexter,” she explained. “Sometimes, you need somebody to ask the right questions. Well-meaning people will say: ‘How are you?’ and you’ll say: ‘I’m fine.’ The home support worker would never ask how I was – because they knew how I was. They ask leading questions, and that gets you to open up more and talk about the night it happened and speak about Dexter and the support available for the boys.”
The charity was able to access counselling for the couple’s two older boys through their school, during which they could talk through their loss in their own space and time.
The Trust also introduced Jennifer to another mum who had lost a baby to cot death, and was slightly further on in her journey.
“That was really helpful,” said Jennifer. “I remember her saying the pain will not go away, but you will learn to live with it. I didn’t believe that. This was so beyond painful. Yet, 10 years on, I can look back on Dexter now and not just think about his death. I can look back on the happy memories we did have. It’s only in the last year that we’ve put photos up of him in the house. They make me smile, now.”
Within a year of losing Dexter, Jennifer gave birth to another son, Gregor – and again, the Scottish Cot Death Trust stepped up to the mark.
“They were amazing. They realised the anxiety that comes with having another baby after cot death,” she explained.
“They got us to learn CPR and provided us with a home apnoea monitor (a machine that monitors a baby’s heart rate and breathing and activates an alarm if breathing slows or stops for 20 seconds). That gave us such peace of mind.
“For the first few months of Gregor’s life, I’d say we almost didn’t enjoy it, because we were waiting for something to happen to him, too.”
Happily, Jennifer, 38, and 41-year-old Iain have welcomed two more additions to their family – Isabella, aged seven, and six-year-old Reuben. And, although their three youngest children didn’t ever meet Dexter, they know so much about their big brother.
Jennifer, who is a first-year student midwife, has sound advice for other families who experience the heartache and devastation of losing a child to cot death.
“Reach out to the Scottish Cot Death Trust and access everything they have to offer, and the peer support, which is really just speaking to someone who has been through the same as you,” she appealed.
“Nothing is going to take that pain away. I definitely do not think we would have got through it without the Scottish Cot Death Trust.”
She urged: “Keep talking about your baby. I feel people think they cannot say our baby’s name because it might upset us, but when they do say his name, it makes us happy to hear it.”
It took almost a year before the couple received conclusive confirmation that Dexter’s life had been lost to cot death – a year during which Jennifer feared her son had suffocated.
“I was at home myself with the boys when it happened, and I blamed myself. I thought that if Iain had been here, this probably would not have happened,” said Jennifer, whose son’s blankets and teddies from his cot were returned to her almost a year after his passing.
“For an entire year, I was blaming myself because I thought I had done something. I feel that less so, now. But I still think that if I’d done something differently, would there have been a different outcome? I will never know.”
