Lindsey Henke, author of When Skies are Gray: A Grieving Mother’s Lullaby
Memoir & Creative Nonfiction Category, sponsored by Bradshaw Celebration of Life Centers
Each week leading up to the 37th annual Minnesota Book Awards, we are featuring exclusive interviews with our finalists. You can also watch the authors in conversation with their fellow category finalists here.
What inspired you to write this book – or inspired you while writing it?
I wrote When Skies Are Gray: A Grieving Mother’s Lullaby as a love letter to my first child and daughter, Nora, who was stillborn in 2012. In the days, weeks, and months after she silently slipped from this world into another, I turned to writing letters to her as a way to express my love and longing. It became my way of grieving, continuing to connect with her in her absence, and allowing me to still parent her—even if only on paper.
What started as letter-writing soon turned into blogging, and eventually, guest blogging for Pregnancy & Newborn Magazine and other publications. This journey led to the creation of a national nonprofit I founded and continue to run ten years later: Pregnancy After Loss Support (PALS). All of this writing eventually culminated in the publication of this book. The release of When Skies Are Gray: A Grieving Mother’s Lullaby is yet another way for me to share my love and my role as Nora’s mother with the world.
What is one detail you wanted to include in this book, but couldn’t find a place for?
There were so many details I wanted to include in the book, as there are countless intimate moments of grief that come with being a bereaved mother. I wanted to share these experiences with readers, but ultimately, many of them didn’t feel like they fit into the overall arc of the story or that there was time for. One such detail is that Zoe, our subsequent child, spent five days in the NICU due to slight breathing issues after her birth. It was a difficult part of our journey, but not as difficult as losing Nora, or as intense as the experiences of other NICU parents. As a result, I chose to skip over those five days towards the end of the book, to keep the length manageable while also staying focused on the parts of our story that centered on pregnancy loss and pregnancy after loss.
Tell us about someone (whose name isn’t on the cover!) who proved instrumental to the creation of this book.
That would be my husband, Nick, who is very much present in the book. With his encouragement and unwavering support, both in terms of time and financial resources, I was able to bring this book into the world. After the births of our two subsequent children, Zoe and Liev, who were born in the wide wake of Nora’s stillbirth, Nick was the one who urged me to continue writing and sharing Nora’s story—and our story—with the world. He wanted other stillbirth families to feel less alone in their grief, just as we did when we discovered the stories of other bereaved parents who had walked this path before us.
And the silent co-conspirator who has forever been in my corner, encouraging me to share Nora’s story with the world through my writing, is my friend, Valerie Meek. She is a fellow stillbirth mom to Patrick, who also left us too soon. Valerie has read all my writing, edited, and made suggestions on how to better access my voice to share our collective story of love and loss of our stillborn children with the world.
Please tell us something about yourself that is not widely known. (It doesn’t have to be about the book in question – or even about your writing at all!)
We lived abroad when I wrote the book. When my youngest child, Liev, was two years old and Zoe was four, my husband was deployed to Germany in his role as a naval intelligence officer. It was during this time that I wrote the bulk of the book. If it hadn’t been for his deployment and our family’s ability to accompany him overseas, I’m not sure I would have had the space and time in my life to write our story from beginning to end. For that, I am deeply grateful.
Share your thoughts about the role and value of libraries.
When I lived in Germany and wrote When Skies Are Gray, I also volunteered at the military base library as a volunteer librarian. That year, I read 100 books while writing my own, and I spent four hours a week re-shelving other authors’ books. Libraries are so important to the mental health of our society. The ability to go to a communal space that is free, where you can feel safe and cozy without having to spend money, surrounded by another person’s story in a book that will either make you feel seen and heard or provide an escape from a hard day, is such a gift. I believe every library is a treasure.
Lindsey Henke is a licensed clinical social worker and psychotherapist specializing in the grief that accompanies life transitions. She founded Pregnancy After Loss Support, a nonprofit for parents pregnant after a previous perinatal loss or infant death.