“Naming Your Child: Hope-filled Reflections on Miscarriage, Stillbirth, & Infant Death”
“Naming Your Child: Hope-filled Reflections on Miscarriage, Stillbirth, & Infant Death” by Jenny Schroedel
This is a beautiful book. It has a mix of medical side of it all, as well as personal stories. It also opens up the realm of possibilities a family can do to honor their child no matter how long ago they lost their little one(s). I started this book a month or so after we lost Samantha because I felt I was ready to begin hearing other people’s stories. I was done with the definitions, the probabilities, the medical side of it all. Although there is some medical side to this book, it comes from qualified people (the authors) who have also experienced a loss through pregnancy or infant loss. So in that way it was all put in to easier terms to understand, follow, and take in. The stories were all different, but had one common thread, loss. For me, it was helpful to hear other people’s stories and to have my feelings validated, making me feel like I was not alone on this path. We all grieve, and those of us that have been through a loss like this have something in common. We know to some degree how others feel and what they are going through, yet because we all grieve differently we can only listen and sympathize. It gave me ideas on how to get through the different emotions, especially the ones I wasn’t used to dealing with…like jealousy. I learned that life will go back to normal. Not necessarily the normal before being pregnant, but a new type of normal and that’s okay. It was helpful also, that the author put such a heavy emphasis on naming your child. It doesn’t matter how recent or how long ago it was, it is still important to give a name. We may all grieve differently, we are all at different stages in the process, but we are all connected on a deeper level.
