Stories from the Stars: 20+ nurturing books for grieving families and kids

Posted on 13 December, 2023

Grief. It’s a beast, I was told, and that is true.

Time stopped for me the moment Frankie took her last breath. My life was divided in two. I screamed, and cried, and lay on the floor howling and I have begged the universe to rip up this soul contract.

In time, I have surrendered on this path and I have learnt to navigate the intense desperation to hold our daughter. This experience stripped us back to a soul level and the rest of our life will now be spent on a different plane.

Now, four years on, life is richer than I remember, somewhat deeper, more intense and more wholesome. I feel I am more intuitive and I know I am a better human being. We weave her short life into our family story as she grows alongside us; elsewhere.

On the night Frankie left, our five-year-old led us into the backyard to say goodnight to Frankie in the stars. We sat on the cold lawn and we prayed that she had made it home to heaven. We let our daughter lead us whatever she needed to do in those first few months, and it became a ritual to talk to the stars.

Siblings grieve too. After our first night, when the sun came up and I realised this wasn’t a dream, I found a copy of The Invisible String in a care package at our front door. We read it every night for a year, and it gave us hope. Hope that we would be OK.

Nothing can take away the pain of grief. I have learnt not to hide from it, instead to speak openly and honestly, which I know is sometimes a little confronting. It is exhausting. It is consuming. I have realised there is nothing quite like grief, and of course, every grief journey is so different.

I don’t know what your journey was like, I only know that mine has been the ultimate undoing. It has humbled me in ways I could never explain.

Frankie and her siblings.

We found relief in storytelling. Our kids loved reading books that made them feel less alone, books about loss and navigating the sadness. I read books that gave me advice on how to keep going. I loved hearing from others who had survived and I read about heaven.

I needed to know she was safe. Someone asked recently how you survive losing a newborn, and my answer was that I don’t really know. And then on reflection, I realised it was stories, in all forms, stories that saved all of us…and so the Stories from the Stars campaign was born.

This Christmas, you can donate a book to the Newborn Intensive Care Foundation (NICF) campaign to supply The Canberra Hospital with grief books for families.

When you are holding a grieving child, it is difficult to summon the strength to know what to say. How do you explain the unexplainable? We hope these books, gifted to families on their darkest day, will provide the tools to guide these hard conversations.

I wish we had been given a pack of these books, and I’m grateful to those friends in our life who sourced them for us, quickly within a few days.

These are our top children’s books to help someone you love, and their children navigate the loss of a baby.

There were also stories that helped me find the light. Some are related to baby loss, others are about grief and some are just incredible stories of courage and strength that grounded me and delivered a bit of a slap back to reality, back into the land of the living when I was feeling hopeless.

These top ten stories made me realise that all of us live some kind of ‘Option B’ and that I was not alone.

These are those that helped us, but we know there are many more. The stories of families who have walked before us, and who survived, offer a beacon of hope when your world comes crashing down. I know we found solace in the collective love we felt; from strangers and other bereaved families who reached out to hold us and share their own stories.

It is our hope that those who have survived, and those who have supported family and friends through this loss, can offer that same hope to those new on this journey, through the gift of a book to this campaign.

If you know someone who has lost a child through miscarriage, stillbirth or neonatal loss, seeing their name written, spoken and honoured is the greatest gift you can give them. Gift a book in their name by visiting The Book Cow in Kingston, and we will honour a life cut short by inserting a beautiful card in the front of the book. Or, if you have simply been touched by the loss of a baby or by grief in the past, gifting a carefully selected book, with love, will soothe a local family and their children.

The Stories from the Stars campaign is open through the NICF, until Sunday 17 December 2023, and will be a yearly campaign.

We hope that sharing our story and the gifts Frankie left us, give hope to families in the early stages of grief, and that they know they too will find light somewhere down the path.

Find out more by visiting newborn.org.au/support or The Book Cow in Kingston at 47 Jardine Street, Kingston.