Life Touches Life: A Mother’s Story of Stillbirth and Healing

“This 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. It will give you hope, and ultimately, is a celebration of life with all its pain, poignancy, and mystery.”

—Christiane Northrup, M.D.
author, The Wisdom of Menopause

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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.

Millennia have passed since the days of King Tut. Yet stillbirth remains enshrouded in silence and mystery. Few doctors research it. Few people, even today, understand or acknowledge the parents’ grief. Stillbirth just goes on. Right now in the United States, one in every 200 wanted, and often perfect, pregnancies ends in stillbirth.

Lorraine Ash’s did 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.

See what readers have to say about Life Touches Life in their letters to Lorraine.

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.

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