The founder of the Pregnancy Loss application publishes honest memories about finding hope amid sadness

(Trigger warning: mention of pregnancy loss and stillbirth. Please use caution.)

Embark on a moving journey through the pages of “When Skies Are Grey: A Grieving Mother’s Lullaby” (May 21, 2024, She Writes Press), the fascinating memoir of psychotherapist Lindsey Henke. Lindsey is the visionary founder of Pregnancy After Loss Support (PALS), a nonprofit organization that offers critical support for parents coping with pregnancy following a prior perinatal loss or infant death.

In the book, newlywed Lindsey happily awaits the birth of her first child, but soon finds herself faced with every parent’s worst nightmare: the devastating news that her baby has a silent heartbeat. The pages of When the Skies Are Gray chart Lindsey’s painful odyssey through loss, capturing the simultaneous dance of mourning and anticipation of a new life. Lindsey’s honest narrative insightfully describes her heartbreaking journey following the stillbirth and the resulting sadness that enveloped her world. These heartfelt memories are a comforting companion to mothers everywhere who may be walking their own grief path.

Following the release of this moving book, we were fortunate enough to post an excerpt from “When the Skies Are Gray” below.

It was only through my mother’s womb that I met my first child, Nora, who died before birth. Silent and still, she slipped into this world for a moment and disappeared on a cold December evening in 2012.

Death stole my daughter from me as I slept in the early darkness of winter and left me alone in the deafening darkness of my sadness as, after nine months of a perfect pregnancy, I went into labor only to be told, “I’m sorry. . . . There is no heartbeat.” Death took not only my child, but also our future memories that had not yet been created, like the intonation of love in my whispering of her name that she would never hear, and I am left to wonder what note she would carry with her cry.

We were denied the entire night I imagined as I lulled her to sleep with a lullaby. The sadness that lives in a mother’s heart after the birth of a stillborn child is like the lyrics of a lullaby, because a lullaby can also be a lament. Frederico Garcia Lorca, a poet who lived in the 1920s, studied Spanish lullabies and noticed the “depth of sadness” in these songs as a mother expressed her intense love and fear for her child through lyrics and rhythm. Lorca theorized that the lullaby was intended not only to calm the child, but also the young mother, constituting a kind of therapy for her.

As a young psychotherapist who was pregnant with Nora, I am ashamed to admit that I did not undergo much therapy before her death. However, in the depths of my grief, as I found myself broken and bawling on the empty nursery floor, with no baby in my arms to sing my laments to, I began to try the therapeutic techniques I had learned in a few short years of practice on my wounded. psyche and soul.

This led me to start a blog about my grief in the weeks after my daughter’s death, and to go to therapy to help me find words to match the notes of my unsung lullaby. I learned the words to this song slowly over the months and years after Nora’s death.

During weekly therapy sessions and through daily blogging, I found the sometimes sweet, often sad lyrics of our song together: a combination of a lullaby and a lament, called lullabies. Lullaments are musical expressions of birth and death, grief and joy, fear and hope, love and loss – ballads embodying the universal truth that life cannot be lived without combining pleasure and pain in one sigh.

Perhaps that’s why these sometimes sad, sometimes happy melodies – which often carry both emotions – have a calm, hypnotic tone to their rhythm as they dance between extremes. Like how, many years later, I am still mesmerized by the love that remains within me for my first daughter, who never heard her mother hum a note of the melody, but it was she who started the song in my heart that I now sing to her siblings as they fall asleep .

This book is the lullaby I never sang to the child who made me a mother. It’s a lament I couldn’t leave out. It is the solace of a grieving mother.

“Mom, tell me a story,” I imagine her saying as we cuddled and sank into the pillows next to each other in her room before bed. Glow-in-the-dark stars illuminate the ceiling and I admire its beauty thanks to the pinkish light of the night salt lamp. Her long, feathery, dark hair, like her father’s, reaches to the tops of her bony shoulders.

I imagine her eyes to be greenish brown, like her sister and brother’s. At the imaginary age of four, I can almost see her growing from the silent and still shell of the baby I held in my arms, into a little baby, and then into a big baby that she will now call herself because she is my first baby in the world. from three.

“What story do you prefer?” I imagine myself asking as he clutches his favorite toy to his chest. I imagine it as a tattered stuffed elephant worn by time and love, the first gift she received from her Aunt Kristi, my sister, before she was stillborn. As I watch her kiss him, I watch my daughter and wonder what lullaby she would like to hear. “Tell me our love story,” she finally replies, eyes wide with wonder, as if it were her favorite story of all.

Leaning down to stroke her brown, earthy-smelling hair once more, I smile, snuggling deeper into the heavy handprint quilt her grandmother made for her. I wonder for a moment where to start. I remember the time when our paths first crossed, but then I focus on an imagined present where I feel her body next to mine, alive and breathing, her life next to mine, alive – just as she was when we were one. And with this wish my lullaby begins.

Once . . .

Lindsey Henke is a licensed social worker and psychotherapist specializing in grief associated with life transitions. She founded Pregnancy After Loss Support (PALS), a non-profit organization for pregnant parents after perinatal loss or infant death. She is also the founder of the PALS app, which is the first app for postpartum parents. Her writing has been published in TODAY, Pregnancy and Newborn, Huffington Post and the New York Times. You can follow Lindsey on Instagram and Facebook and download the PALS app from the App Store or Google Play.