Life Touches Life: A Mother's Story of Stillbirth and Healing
Lorraine Ash
Stillbirth has been with humanity since the beginning. One of the earliest known expressions of this kind of grief was found in the tomb of Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamen, buried with the mummies of his two unborn children. Down through human history stillbirth has been a part of women’s stories, often unspoken and silently held close to their hearts.
Today, worldwide, 4 million babies are stillborn every year and it still remains enshrouded in silence and mystery. Few doctors research stillbirth and few people understand or acknowledge the parents’ grief. Right now in the United States, one in every 200 wanted pregnancies ends in stillbirth.
Lorraine Ash’s perfect pregnancy ended in a stillbirth in 1999, the year her daughter and only child, Victoria Helen, died in utero on the day that should have been her birthday. Victoria succumbed to a Group B Strep infection that almost killed her mother, too. During the difficult and life-transforming months and years that followed, Ash wrote the book she longed for but could not find. Life Touches Life is a road map from pain and chaos to understanding and acceptance. Drawing on great thinkers, personal loves, and the wisdom in everyday events, Ash explains how she made it through this difficult emotional terrain and how her experiences led to richer ways of seeing, being, and loving in the world.
In these pages, Ash describes delivering Victoria’s body, her own struggle to live, the question of God and eternity, abandonment by friends, the search for inner peace, the tyranny of the holidays, and the wondrous land of love and grief to which she was delivered years after the trauma.
Life Touches Life is for every mother and father of a stillborn child, and anyone who wants to understand and love them. It is a book for anyone who suffers great loss of any kind and emerges onto a new life landscape suddenly and inexplicably. It is a way—finally—to open a new conversation with and about life. Readers also will find in this unique work an overview of the status of stillbirth in the United States and the world, and a list of resources that reflect a new and growing perinatal loss movement here and abroad.
Praise
Life Touches Life is the most hauntingly beautiful, honest and inspiring story of loss, grief, and transformation that I’ve ever read. I couldn’t put it down and read it in one sitting. Within these pages, I found good and powerful medicine for anyone who is in the crucible of grief, experiencing their hopes and dreams being burned away by forces they cannot control. It will give you solace. It will give you hope. It is, ultimately, a celebration of life with all its pain, poignancy, and mystery.
Love unifies us, inseparably, with each other. Perhaps the most majestic expression of this union is the connection of mother and child. No one has described this better than Lorraine Ash in her moving testament of her daughter’s stillbirth. Life Touches Life is a tribute to love and life everywhere. Never have we needed such a vision as now.
In my own life, I have been surrounded by women who have experienced the devastating loss of a child. I have seen how the excruciating pain can twist a woman's soul. I have also seen, in the pages of this book, how it can melt the walls of a Mother's heart, exposing the rarest kind of beauty and grace. Life Touches Life is an exquisitely beautiful story that carries the reader through the darkest of hours into the brilliant light of faith, hope and eternal love.
The Mother and Child is perhaps the greatest icon of tenderness and intimacy that we have. The mother carries the child under her heart. The womb of the mother is the child’s first world. Lorraine Ash has written a most poignant account of her daughter’s life in that first world and the tragedy that stopped her at the threshold to the outside world. There is immense pain here, huge loss, and a searing loneliness. Yet the beauty of her account shows how hope, healing, and new possibility can be harvested from the terrain of sorrow. Eventually, the sore of grief becomes a well of presence.
In Life Touches Life, Lorraine Ash gives us an intimate glimpse into an aspect of the human experience most of us might have otherwise never known. And she has done so with such eloquence, elegance, and grace that I truly couldn’t put it down. The writing is beautiful — simple and direct, but flowing with the warmth and music of great poetry. Lorraine’s sharing of one of life’s most devastating and least talked-about experiences is brilliant. She paints a glorious portrayal of the opening and flowering of her own soul in response to her grief. It is a beautiful tale of one woman’s struggle to come to terms with an experience that to most of us would seem incomprehensible and totally unacceptable. Yet she shows us how she turned it into a path to the deepest realms of her heart and soul.
I highly recommend this superbly written, enlightening and inspirational story to everyone, no matter what their age, gender, or life circumstance. It is a deeply touching story of the boundless depth, resilience, love and wisdom of the human spirit.
About The Author
Lorraine Ash currently offers workshops and writing retreats to present the nuts-and-bolts techniques for good writing and offer examples for successful published works. She particularly likes to work with new writers to guide them in creating their vest work. Her business, Lorraine Ash Literary Services, offers editorial services and one-on-one coaching for authors.
Ash worked as a newspaper journalist for many years, writing for the Daily Record in Parsippany, New Jersey, as well as Ridgewood News and Daily Voice. Her feature articles and series, particularly on health and women’s issues, have won national, state, and regional awards and appeared in daily newspapers across the country. Ash’s second book, Self and Soul: On Creating a Meaningful Life, is a spiritual memoir published by Cape House Books in 2012. Ash and her husband Bill founded Cape House Publishing to publish and promote spiritual memoirs.
In her earlier years as a writer, Ash’s penchant for history inspired her to write three plays, each about a U.S. president; Monroe, Jackson and Tyler. They were published by The History Project, based in Galax, Virginia. Her essays have also appeared in various literary journals. She earned a master’s degree in Communications from Fordham University, and studied writing at various venues, including the Wesleyan Writers Conference in Connecticut, the Fine Arts Work Center in Massachusetts, and the American Society of Journalists and Authors in New York. She also taught writing on the college level and is a member of The International Women’s Writing Guild.
Ash lives in Allendale, New Jersey, with her husband, Bill, a jazz trumpeter. Her passions include Hindu philosophy, bookstores and libraries, good food, fitness, and the state of Maine. As a peer grief contact, she works one-on-one with stillbirth mothers. The authors web site: www.lorraineash.com
