[Trigger Warning: mention of pregnancy loss and stillbirth. Please take care.]
Embark on a poignant journey through the pages of “When Skies Are Gray: A Grieving Mother’s Lullaby” (May 21, 2024, She Writes Press), a compelling memoir by psychotherapist Lindsey Henke. Lindsey is the visionary founder of Pregnancy After Loss Support (PALS), a nonprofit offering crucial support for parents navigating pregnancy after a previous perinatal loss or infant death.
In the book, newlywed Lindsey joyously anticipates the arrival of her first child, only to be confronted by every parent’s worst nightmare: the devastating news of her baby’s silent heartbeat. The pages of “When Skies Are Gray” navigate Lindsey’s agonizing odyssey through loss, portraying the simultaneous dance of mourning and the anticipation of new life. Lindsey’s candid narrative intimately unfolds her heart-wrenching stillbirth journey and the subsequent grief that enveloped her world. This heartfelt memoir serves as a comforting companion for mothers worldwide who may be navigating their own path of grief.
Upon the release of this poignant book, we were lucky enough to feature an excerpt from “When Skies Are Gray” below.
Through the womb was the only way I ever knew my first child, Nora, who died before she was born. Silent and still, she slipped briefly into this world and out on a cold December evening in 2012.
Death stole my daughter from me as I slept in winter’s early hours of darkness and left me alone in the deafening blackness of my sorrow, when after nine months of a perfect pregnancy, I went into labor only to be told, “I’m sorry . . . there’s no heartbeat.” Death took not only my child but also our future memories yet to be made, like the intonation of love in my murmur of her name she would never hear, and I am left to wonder on what note she would have carried her cry.
We were denied the lifetime of nights I had imagined swaying her to sleep with a lullaby. The grief that lives on in a mother’s heart after the stillbirth of her baby is like lyrics to a lullaby, for a lullaby can also be a lament. Frederico Garcia Lorca, a poet in the 1920s, studied Spanish lullabies and noticed a “depth of sadness” in these songs as a mother vocalized her intense love and fear for her child through lyrics and rhythm. Lorca theorized that the function of the lullaby was not only to soothe the baby but also the new mother, serving as a type of therapy for her.
As a young psychotherapist when pregnant with Nora, I’m ashamed to admit I did not go to much therapy before she died. But in the depths of my mourning, finding myself broken and bawling on an empty nursery floor with no baby in my arms to sing my lament to, I turned to trying out therapy techniques I had learned in my few short years of practice on my injured psyche and soul.
This led me to create a blog about my grief in the weeks that followed my daughter’s death, as well as going to actual therapy to help me find the words to match the notes of my unsung lullaby. I learned the lyrics 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 to our shared song: a combination of both a lullaby and a lament, referred to as lullaments. Lullaments are musical expressions of birth and death, grief and joy, fear and hope, love, and loss—ballads epitomizing a universal truth that life cannot be lived without holding both pleasure and pain within the same sigh.
This may be why these sometimes sad, sometimes joyful tunes—that often hold both emotions—possess a tranquil, hypnotic tone within their rhythm as they dance between the extremes. Like how, years later, I’m still hypnotized by the love left within me for my first daughter, who never heard a hummed note of her mother’s tune but was the one who started the song within my heart now sung to her siblings as they fall asleep.
This book is the lullaby I never got to sing to the child that made me a mother. It’s the lament I could not leave unsung. It’s the lullament of the bereaved mother.
“Mama, tell me a story,” I imagine her saying as we cuddled, sinking into the pillows side by side next to each other in her room before bed. The glow-in-the-dark stars illuminate the ceiling, and I take in her beauty by the pinkish hue from the salt lamp nightlight. Her long feathery dark hair, like her father’s, brushes across the tops of her bony shoulders.
I envision her eyes as greenish brown, like her sister and brother’s. At the imagined 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 toddler, then a big kid, which she would be calling herself by now since she is my first out of three.
“What story would you like?” I imagine asking as she hugs her favorite toy close to her chest. I picture it as a tattered stuffed elephant worn with time and love, the first gift she received from her aunt Kristi, my sister, before she was stillborn. I watch her give him kisses as I study my daughter, pondering what lullaby she would like to hear. “Tell me our love story,” she finally replies with wide eyes full of wonder, as if it’s her most favorite story of all.
Leaning in to stroke her brown, earthy-smelling hair once more, I smile, snuggling deeper under the heavy handprint quilt that her grandmother made. I take a moment to think about where to start. I recall the time when our paths first crossed but then focus on the imagined present, where I can feel her body next to mine, alive and breathing, her life, next to mine, alive—like she was when we were one. And with this wish, my lullaby begins.
Once upon a time . . .
Lindsey Henke is a licensed clinical social worker and psychotherapist specializing in the grief that accompanies life transitions. She founded Pregnancy After Loss Support (PALS), a nonprofit for parents pregnant after a previous perinatal loss or infant death. She is also the founder of the PALS app, which is the first app for parents who are pregnant after loss. Her writing has been featured TODAY, Pregnancy and Newborn magazine, Huffington Post and New York Times. You can follow Lindsey on Instagram and Facebook, and download the PALS App from the App Store or Google Play.
