Creative Acts of Healing: After a Baby Dies

Rating:
Summary: The author writes down what I feel and cannot name.
Review: After the loss of our full term healthy baby daughter I grabbed all books I could find about infant loss. But this book really touched me. I recognize so much of her feelings, emotions, thougths... She made me realize that what I felt was normal after the loss of a baby. When I started it I just could not stop reading. Allthough it was in English (I'm Dutch), it was very readable for me, except for some of her poems, which are very difficult for a foreigner to understand. My husband, which is not such a book reader at all read it too, after I recommended it to him and he loved it. I can recommend it to everyone who has lost a baby, including the people who have to deal with friends or relatives who have lost a baby.

Rating:
Summary: Creative Acts of Healing after a baby dies
Review: This book is much more than a heart-breakingly honest and moving description of the agonizing months for the author after the death at birth of her daughter ARIANE. It also describes her development as an artist; her struggles to maintain a strong relationship with her husband.

Judith van Praag is so generous in sharing her feelings with us that she has created a book that will move anyone who has suffered loss--that is to say most readers. By sharing her journal, she also gives unique insight into the spirit of an artist; the joys and challenge of living a creative life.

This is a unique book which allows us to share vanPraag's grief, her determination to live the life of the artist, in short, her life. Anyone who reads this book will be enriched by it.

Rating:
Summary: Good, but not what I expected
Review: What the book is not:
A book of ideas to help you mourn and recover from the loss of your baby. Projects to memorialize your lost child as a way to heal. Ideas for little rituals to mourn/celebrate your baby.

What the book is:
The first part is written in journal style, being the writings of the author during the first year after the loss and commentary (made 5 yrs. later) about those entries. The second part of the book is written in narrative prose and continues relating how she and her husband coped with their loss on a long term basis.

A lot of the feelings expressed by the author of this book will be familiar to those who've lost babies (especially at or before birth), but I also found some of it (usually the parts in the Netherlands that were unlike American experience) to be irrelevant to me personally. It's still great for anyone needing to hear a voice from someone who's been there.

It's a good book, but what I was thinking it would be when I bought it was more along the lines of what I listed above in "What the book is not". I didn't really need a book to tell me my feelings about miscarriage were valid and common or what the stages of grief are. I needed some project to do or creative way to show the world my baby is/was real.