It's hard to find the right words to describe precisely how it feels when the baby you've carried for nine months is stillborn.

Kerrie Fuller sits on her sofa, searching desperately for an appropriate way of summing up the past year; the nine months she carried her son and the aftermath. The grief and loss. What should have been, rather than the grim reality. It's virtually impossible, she says.

"I could try to tell you," she says, "but, really, I wouldn't come close."

In the end she settles for this. She found it on the internet. She doesn't know who wrote it or when, but she understands only too well the emotion behind it. It seems to sum up everything better than anything she could muster, she says.

'When you lose one of your parents, you lose some of your past.

'When you lose your partner, you lose a part of your present.

'When you lose your child, you lose your future.'

That's how it feels, she says. You grieve for what you lost, the death of your child, the cruellest and most needless death of all. But that's just a part of it.

You're left with a life in pieces; a life that, no matter how many times you put those pieces back together, will always have a huge hole in the middle.

You live this new life with a permanent ache in your heart and a constant sense that you've been needlessly denied something special and right and good and there's no reason, no justification, that comes close to explaining that.

This is Kerrie's story. It begins a year ago, when she and her partner Glen decided it was time to become parents.

"I always wanted children, but we thought it might take some time," she says. It didn't. She became pregnant more or less instantly. Kerrie and Glen were delighted.

Kerrie wanted a girl, Glen wanted a boy. They found out it was a boy at an early scan. They decided to call him Keaton.

"We didn't agree on many names, but we did agree that whatever name we chose, it should be a bit different, a bit unusual," she says. They both liked Keaton.

So Keaton it was. He was a right little wriggler, too, says Kerrie. She didn't just feel the occasional punch and the odd kick during her nine-month term – "I could feel him moving his bum around, shuffling around inside, sitting down, standing up, shoving his bum out."

And then, one day, all this moving and fidgeting abruptly stopped. Kerrie was 38 weeks and four days pregnant.

On Wednesday, November 10 last year, Kerrie, an accounts manager, went to the Leicester Royal Infirmary for an emergency scan.

She was concerned, but not panic-stricken. She'd read about babies dying in early stages of pregnancy, but not at 38 weeks and four days. Her pregnancy, after all, had been more or less trouble-free.

The first midwife looked for the baby's heartbeat and found nothing. Oh, it will just be the equipment playing up, she said, as emergency calls were patched through to various departments.

Another midwife arrived, a more senior one. They detected Kerrie's heartbeat, but not the baby's. A consultant arrived. They did a full scan.

"I never saw the scan, but Glen did," she says. It showed her baby son, motionless. There was no heartbeat.

"They never said why or what had happened, just that he didn't have a heartbeat."

And with that, they took Kerrie away.

She didn't believe it at first, as they booked her an appointment to be induced the following day.

Kerrie asked all sorts of questions. No-one could answer them. All they knew was that Kerrie's son would be stillborn.

"I went back in the next day – I was late, I didn't want to go – still hoping that they'd got it wrong, praying that they'd made a mistake."

Sadly, they hadn't.

Little Keaton William Mackie was born after a full labour on Friday, November 12, at 2.37pm, weighing exactly 5lb.

A post-mortem examination revealed he died of thrombophilia, blood clots to the brain and kidneys.

It's a hereditary condition, and yet no-one in either Kerrie or Glen's family has ever suffered from it.

Doctors are currently running all sorts of tests to find out precisely what happened.

Kerrie and Glen left hospital the following day, after spending the night with Keaton; returning to their home in Whetstone with a magnolia-coloured memory box rather than their son.

The box contained a lock of Keaton's hair, his handprints, his footprints, his hospital band and his measurements marked on a paper tape measure. Today, it sits in their living room.

It was just so wrong, says Kerrie. "And yet I didn't cry much that night," she says. "When he was with me, it just felt right, somehow."

His funeral was a month later. Kerrie has only vague recollections of the day – a packed church, a small white coffin, her partner Glen bearing it to the church and then again to the grave.

"It was the hardest thing he's ever had to do," says Kerrie, "but he wanted to do it for his son."

They played Make You Feel My Love, by Adele, at the funeral. Kerrie used to sing it to her unborn son when she was pregnant. Since then, she says, it's taken on a whole new meaning.

The grief changes all the time, she says. It grows, it shrinks, sometimes you think it will consume you, sometimes you think it will drive you mad.

She went to Sands – the Stillbirth and Neonatal Death Society – to talk to other mums and dads who had been through similar experiences.

For a long time, it was the only place where Kerrie felt at home.

"People say 'how are you' and 'how are you bearing up' and I say 'yeah, I'm fine'.

"Who wants to hear that 'no, I'm not really fine and that I cry everyday and I think of my baby everyday'? No-one wants to hear that, do they?

"Because I do think of how my baby would look everyday, what colour his eyes would be, who he would look like, how he would be behaving.

"I don't feel like I can always say that. But I feel I can say that at Sands because they know. They understand exactly how I feel.

"I hope that, one day, I'll get pregnant again and we'll have the family that we long for," she says.

But even if they do, it won't fill the gap in their lives that was left when Keaton died. It can't.

"That will always be there," she says.

"I hope we can go on to have other children. But we'll never, ever forget Keaton."

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An auction will be held at Green’s Health and Fitness centre on Abbey Lane on

Friday, April 8 from 7.30pm, featuring all sorts of top prizes and a disco

afterwards.

“If anyone can help with donations for such a great cause, please get in

touch,” says Kerrie.

All funds will go to Sands, so the charity can buy more memory boxes for

bereaved parents. For more information log onto:

www.inmemoryofourangels.yolasite.com

Sands meets on the first Wednesday of each month at The Laura Centre, in

Tower Street, Leicester from 8pm to 10pm. Call 07721 068 464 for more

information.