Matt Earle is the host of Confronted, a podcast about his daughter's stillbirth.
Warning: This story includes details and images depicting baby loss.
What are you meant to do with love when there’s no one there to give it to? That’s a question Matt Earle asks in his new podcast about the stillbirth of his daughter. Bridget Jones discovers why he wants other men to talk about the grief of losing a child, too.
Forty weeks, a long labour, then you go home with a bonny baby. Unless ... What if you get pregnant, count down the weeks, labour starts and then you are told that you won’t be taking a bonny baby home because your baby has died before you get to meet it?
Matt Earle had never heard the word stillbirth before his daughter Mackenzie was born sleeping in February 2024. He’d heard stories and gossip about friends-of-friends in Nelson, where he lives with his partner Lauren Ensor. But the word? That specific word? No, that was a new language, learned against his will, rolling around, tinny in his mouth right when he should have been whispering lullabies.
“You always imagine the moment your baby’s born. But I had never imagined the moment they tell you that she’s gone before she’s even here.”
According to Health New Zealand Te Whatu Ora, stillbirth (a fetal death at or after 20 weeks of gestation) occurs at a rate of almost eight per 1000 total births. In real terms, that is between 450 to 500 fetal deaths each year. Late stillbirths, from 28 weeks onwards, occur in about one in every 400 to 500 births in New Zealand. Ensor was full term when Mackenzie was stillborn.
On that day, Earle remembers that foreign word becoming part of him, part of them and part of their story.
Two-and-a-half years on, he is sharing that story in a podcast, Confronted. In it he talks to one of his best friends about Mackenzie’s stillbirth, the days and months leading up to it, the moment itself, and the shape of the shadow that lingers now.
The conversation, which spans what happens in the 18 months after Mackenzie’s death, is vulnerable, horribly sad and surprisingly funny at times, too. Ensor appears in it a couple of times, but Earle wants the series to be something other men can listen to and use to help process their own feelings about something we don’t really talk about.
Feelings like, “how the f*** are we meant to survive this?”, which he asked himself early on, both in the recording and in real life.
Earle has always wanted to be a dad. So he felt a mixture of joy and shock when, over a non-alcoholic gin cocktail at the bar where they had one of their first dates, Ensor told him she was pregnant. They had been together for about eight months and trying for a baby for just one.
“I just cried … We were over the moon. That night I just could not sleep because, is this real? I’d be driving around, and forget about it for a second and then be like, oh my god! And then I told my parents and my dad’s jaw dropped. I’ve never seen anyone’s jaw drop so far,” he says.
“We shouldn’t have actually talked about it that early because this was only in the first few weeks, but I needed to tell people because I was like, what the hell’s going on?”
The New Zealand College of Midwives puts miscarriage rates at about one-in-four to one-in-five pregnancies and many people choose to keep pregnancy a secret for the first trimester, when the risk of miscarriage is highest. How many people think about what happens when you lose a baby near the end of a pregnancy, though?
For nine months, Earle says Ensor’s pregnancy was pretty “normal”. The couple counted down the weeks and near the end, they did a professional photoshoot on the beach, Earle marvelling at his partner’s “big belly”.
“It was good fun,” he says.
They were enjoying the process of preparing to become parents, until worries started over how slowly Mackenzie was growing. But scans showed there was still a heartbeat, and when Ensor went into labour one night in February, they were excited. Earle recorded their drive to the hospital the next morning and it features in the podcast.
“The next part’s the awful part.”
He remembers hospital staff checking the baby’s heartbeat with a doppler, a handheld ultrasound device. He says the midwife knew where the baby was positioned (“you know, because it’s their job”) but she paused when she couldn’t find a heartbeat. She tried on another machine, and Earle says the same thing happened again.
“I still thought everything was fine,” he says. “I’ve never been through a birth before.”
When a second midwife tried, something cracked.
“The other midwife was just such a bad actor. Like her face said it all in that moment. I was like, oh f***.”
Then, they waited. It was early and the hospital’s obstetrician wasn’t on the wards yet. The midwives couldn’t confirm anything until she did her checks. Earle says it felt like hours, but was probably more like 45 minutes. Three-quarters of an hour where all they could do was cry and think about how Mackenzie’s heartbeat had rung out loud two days earlier, during their last check-up.
“The obstetrician came, got out her thingamajigies and then the worst part was she goes, ‘I’m just checking the stomach, now I’m checking the kidneys’. Like, f***, why can’t you just say it straight away?” Earle remembers.
“I asked and she said, ‘I’m so sorry, there’s no heartbeat’. And then that was that.”
At that moment, the world split in two; on one side was what felt real and on the other, everything that didn’t feel possible.
“You’re so used to being able to understand things when they happen, but it’s just so much confusion.”
Hours later, after an “excruciating, excruciating” wait, Ensor delivered their little girl. She was “beautiful”, “fully formed” and “perfectly shaped”. And when pushed, Earle reckons yeah, maybe she looked like him. He has her foot tattooed – to scale – on his leg, the details taken from a print the hospital made.
He remembers trying to enjoy it as much as possible when she was born, because the one thing that was certain was how much he instantly felt like a dad.
“I cherished that moment, because this is still our child and I’m not going to let this day be remembered as – I mean, it’s going to be remembered as the worst day of my life, but there [were] beautiful moments too.”
Reality came at the family fast. There was paperwork they expected, and some they never imagined having to deal with, like brochures on funerals and burial options.
Time passed minute by minute, simply making it through one to get to the next. Even now, Earle can’t believe they did get through the heartbreak.
“This is the deepest grief. Almost impossible.”
It came in waves, where one second he felt like survival was possible, and then the next, often when a friend checked in or they had to tell another person what had happened, he wanted to disappear. He remembers people “dancing around” their loss, not knowing what to do or how to do it. He remembers Ensor listening to podcasts about loss. He was given books about grief, but found them too sad.
Together. They held each other together.
“[Losing Mackenzie] made us so much closer because, of course, family was helpful, but no one knows, in your heart, what happened, except for each other.”
Mackenzie came home and had five days wrapped up in her parents’ warmth, away from the coldness of a hospital or funeral home. They took photos with her, she went with them as they swam at a favourite river spot, they showed her Nelson, their friends and family.
Ensor would read her stories, and Mackenzie would sleep between them in bed. Earle remembers waking in the middle of the night to the sound of his partner wailing, a moment of forgotten peace shattered by a remembered reality in the dark.
They held a tangi at his parents’ house. They didn’t pressure anyone to be there, but they were.
“My friends came, [Lauren’s] friends came. They all gave Mackenzie a hug, which was really nice. That signified that she was a real person and that we were parents.
“By the time we actually buried her, it was quite a relief because that part needed to end and we needed to start a different kind of grieving.”
In the days and weeks that followed Mackenzie’s burial, the couple created little rituals, things that signposted that they had made it through another day. In the mornings, they would cold plunge together, and at night, they would sit in the hot tub and think about what they were grateful for, and what they had done that day that was good for them.
The family chose to have an autopsy conducted on Mackenzie. Because there was no obvious reason she was stillborn, they wanted answers when and if they went on to try for more children. Earle talks about it in depth in the podcast, but even after that, there were no firm answers.
“It’s going to be a lifelong journey with that,” Earle says. “There was no real reason for this to happen.”
He never planned to make the podcast, but he creates content in his day job, so films and record a lot of his life out of habit. It was only after burying Mackenzie that he even remembered he had recorded key moments, like their drive to the hospital the morning she was born.
“I was only recording that because I thought, this is such a cool occasion … Now, I find that recording quite haunting.”
Ensor wonders why he chose to document that particular moment.
“Sometimes he’d push record and I’d be like, ‘Really? Now? Really?’ I actually can’t believe that he recorded me in labour ... like, What in that moment made you?” she wonders aloud.
Watch the trailer for Confronted. The story continues below
She’s listened to the podcast, but only in bits. What Earle chose to include – and what he didn’t – surprised her, but she says it highlights the difference between their experience.
“The journey of a grieving father versus a grieving mother and the challenges with that, you come from very different angles. And I think for Matt, it’s been a really great way for him to reflect on it all and process it.
“But I guess what mattered to him in moments was sometimes different to what triggered or mattered to me in those moments – and that’s been a really interesting reflection.”
She wants their story to help normalise a painfully common situation and to bridge the gap between joining the community of people who have experienced baby loss and showing there is a way to move forward.
“There were a lot of days where I was crying myself to sleep … but I guess you have to keep moving. Like, there’s two options: you could be in bed and spiral into a very deep depression or you could build connection and look for things that keep you going. And I guess we tried to do things that build connection.
“If someone else says to you, ‘things happen for a reason’ ... you want to punch them,” she says.
“But at the same time, the more I’ve been through this journey, the more I do think everybody has really difficult things that happen in their life, and for us it was a stillbirth ... I guess it’s about how you take those things and you learn from them and you build resilience and also build them into your story.”
Earle has the same idea. In the podcast, he wants people to hear from someone who has lived it, no holds barred.
“Things happen to people that suck for no reason. But I wanted to show that there are ways to work through it. And one [way] is to just accept that you’re not going to be able to figure everything out.”
He wants the project to be the start of more conversations between men about loss and grief and feelings. Conversations where they learn they don’t have to bottle things up, and be strong all the time.
“You don’t have to do it all by yourself.”
Earle isn’t a saint, with some superhuman capacity to heal. It took him time to come to this understanding. He still gets angry sometimes and he and Ensor “don’t muck around” or second guess whether to talk to a doctor about even the smallest health concerns. She has had counselling since the loss of Mackenzie, but Earle hasn’t (he’s been in therapy before though).
“I probably still need to, to be fair, but I’ve never felt at a point where I didn’t know what to do.”
It’s a little bit of a spoiler, but eventually the couple decided to try for another baby. It makes up the final episode of the podcast, and isn’t without its own moments of tension.
Deciding to start trying again was “like a double-edged sword” – they wanted to have another baby, but they didn’t want to minimise what had happened to them or imply Mackenzie wasn’t an important part of their family.
“We didn’t want to just completely forget about what happened. And we didn’t really know how we were going to feel going through it.
“But of course you’re just scared s***less.
“I remember thinking that I had no idea how bad the first time was [at the time] … It made me almost sadder.”
The family visit Mackenzie’s grave often, although they prefer to call it Mackenzie Town. They talk to her, leave photos and flowers. The podcast is another marker in her honour.
“Personally, my life has improved maybe tenfold since it happened,” Earle says, surprisingly.
He explains he is grateful for the way losing Mackenzie has strengthened his relationship with Ensor. He values his friendships more, he’s more content, more driven, more empathetic.
“And that’s kind of like the way I want to live … Mackenzie didn’t get the chance to live her life so I’ve got to live mine the best that I can.”
You can listen to Confronted on iHeart radio and other podcast platforms now. Follow @joshandmearle on Instagram for more content.
Bridget Jones joined the New Zealand Herald in 2025. She has been a lifestyle and entertainment journalist and editor for more than 15 years.