Welsh mum turns grief into Luna’s Light charity
Philippa Atkins creates Luna’s Light CIC to teach children grief literacy after losing baby Luna, offering books and programmes across Wales.
Cardiff mother Philippa Atkins has turned the tragedy of losing her infant daughter Luna into a nationwide effort to teach children about grief. Luna died shortly after being brought home from hospital, leaving her big sister Skye the only child who ever held the newborn.
The following day Atkins faced the painful task of explaining Luna’s death to Skye, a moment that sparked a determination to help other families navigate similar loss. She illustrated and published the children’s book Skye & Luna, designed to give families age‑appropriate language for discussing baby loss, death and remembrance.
The project has grown into Luna’s Light CIC, a charitable organisation that works with children, families and schools to develop what it calls “grief literacy”. “We tend to learn about grief after the fact, grief and death and dying is something that we are all going to experience, and it can happen at any age, and having the tools and understanding of what grief is likely to or can or might feel like is really important,” Atkins said.
She added that baby loss remains a taboo subject in society, leaving many families to grieve in silence. “How do we raise a generation that can look difficult conversations in the eye and can face them, how do we give children better skills than we have as adults tend to have, how can we teach them to be curious, to never stop asking those questions and to not be afraid of the difficult conversations,” she explained.
Atkins believes that children need the freedom to ask questions, even when adults feel uncertain about the answers. “If either of my children go through [baby loss], they will know how to deal with it.”
That doesn’t mean it will be easy, that doesn’t mean it won’t be the worst experience of their life but they will at least be armed with the knowledge that they have a choice and they can choose to remember and honour that baby. They do not have to say goodbye to it, that baby does not have to disappear from their family,” she said.
Luna’s Light CIC is now creating creative, age‑appropriate programmes that let children explore emotions, loss and grief in a safe environment. The aim is not to frighten youngsters but to give them an emotional vocabulary they can carry throughout life.
“We teach children about their bodies, relationships, emotions and how to keep themselves safe.” Yet death is something that will eventually touch every one of our lives, and still, we can be incredibly uncomfortable talking to children about it.
We can’t protect our children from ever experiencing grief. But perhaps we can prepare them better for it,” Atkins said.
The charity argues that grief literacy should sit alongside other aspects of emotional education, building resilience before a crisis occurs. During Baby Loss Awareness Week the organisation ran a crowdfunder, directing all donations to purchase books for the Neonatal Outreach programme at Glangwili General Hospital in Carmarthen.
Atkins urges the public to use the awareness week to name the babies they have lost, reminding families that “your baby was real and your baby matters”. She hopes that by normalising conversation around miscarriage, stillbirth and infant death, society will move towards a more open, supportive approach for grieving families.