Customer Reviews

Creative Acts of Healing: After a Baby Dies

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

The author grabbed into the deepest part of my soul through her honesty, straight-forwardness, and colorful use of the English language. Not only was I moved emotionally, but given some key information on how to deal with others who face loss of a baby during childbirth. My husband and I have decided to use the information gleaned from this book in counseling and working with women who hurt after the loss of a child. It is a necessary book for doctors, social workers, ministers/pastors, counselors, mothers, and anyone desiring to be a parent. Although loss of a child through childbirth is a subject we tend to avoid, it is important for us to aid in the healing process by responding correctly to those who have faced such horror.

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.

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.

This book is a record of a journal of loss, told five years after the author lost her baby at birth. I found it affecting, honest, and often moving. I really admired van Praag's ability to put bitterness and blame behind her. That is something that I have not been able to accomplish.

I had a special interest in the book, as an expat living in the Netherlands. I recognized a lot of what she had to say about the Dutch care system around pregnancy (I think that I even recognized the hospital), and was infuriated for her and with her.

The title is a little bit misleading. It may seem that it is one of those grief workbooks that are recently being released. In van Praag's case, the creative acts of healing refer to her work as a poet and painter. Her journals discuss how the death of her child affected her both as a woman and an artist.

I read this a year after my child died, and I tend to think that this is the right time frame for reading these kinds of first person memoirs. I would have been too raw to read it and understand in the direct aftermath of the loss.

While the title of this book Creative Acts After A Baby Dies by Judith van Pragg clearly carves its primary and intentional audience as parents, immediate and extended family, friends, co-workers and networks of those who must death of a baby after birth, these highly laudable perimeters are by no means absolute.

As an artist and female of similar vintage raised by parents and grandparents imprisoned in the United State's own World War II interment camps, whose much-looked forward introduction to parenthood began with an emergency C-section (transverse lie) I share and echo her convictions as to the tremendous power, value and healing potential of the creative arts.

I instantly recognized and related in van Praag's story the fragmentary outlines of my own long, dragged out and ragged journey which continued well after the initial identification of emotional stages, communication challenges and other signposts of which she wrote.

That these bells continued to read clear and true during an unusual life turn of my own when my health took a rapid nosedive (three lower spinal compression fractures less three months after giving birth) a result of a seldom seen, sudden and devastating decline of bone density leading to measurements on par with very elderly, only served to further reinforce my earlier beliefs.

If a single rating could be agreed upon to sum up a overall final, ultimate beauty, timeless appeal and value of Judith's book, this total is forever intertwined with the undisputable fact for those whose participation in otherwise commonly shared touchstones as childbirth take sudden detours or any for that matter, great and unimaginable loss as we choose to personally define onto dark, lonely and obscure pathways that their loved ones, friends and associates are unable or unwilling to tread much less follow, van Praag's stirring, uplifting testimony (and that of her husband) offers a most precious and lasting gift.