A Gift of Time – Continuing Your Pregnancy When Your Baby’s Life is Expected to Be Brief – Amy Kuebelbeck and Deborah Davis

A Gift of Time is a gentle and practical guide for parents who decide to continue their pregnancy knowing that their baby’s life will be brief. When prenatal testing reveals that an unborn child is expected to die before or shortly after birth, some parents will choose to proceed with the pregnancy and to welcome their child into the world. With compassion and support, A Gift of Time walks them step-by-step through this challenging and emotional experience—from the infant’s life-limiting prenatal diagnosis and the decision to have the baby to coping with the pregnancy and making plans for the baby’s birth and death.

Loving and Letting Go – Deborah L. Davis PhD

Deborah Davis has written, Loving and Letting Go, for those parents who decide not to seek aggressive medical intervention for their critically ill newborn. The book guides parents as they try to sort through the medical information that is being presented them and balancing that with the many emotions and quality of life issues that parents in this situation must weigh. Davis also helps parents anticipate some of the reactions others may have to their decision and offers possible responses. A much needed and well done resource.

Newborn Death: for parents experiencing the death of a very small infant – Joy and Marvin Johnson with Chaplains James Cunningham and Sarah Ewing and RN’s Dale Hatcher and Carol Dannen

This book is for you if you’ve experienced a miscarriage, a stillbirth or had a baby who died shortly after birth. It’s hard to say “death” when you’ve scarcely had time to say “birth”.

Notes for the Everlost – Kate Inglis

Part memoir, part handbook for the heartbroken, this powerful, unsparing account of losing a premature baby will speak to all who have been bereaved and are grieving, and offers inspiration on moving forward, gently integrating the loss into life.

Inglis’s story is a springboard that can help other bereaved parents—and anyone who has experienced wrenching loss—reflect on emotional survival in the first year; dealing with family, friends, and bystanders post-loss; the unique survivors’ guilt, feelings of failure, and isolation of bereavement; and the fortitude of like-minded community and small kindnesses. Inglis’s unique voice—at once brash, irreverent, and achingly beautiful—creates a nuanced picture of the landscape of grief, encompassing the trauma, the waves of disbelief and emptiness, the moments of unexpected affinity and lightness, and the compassion that grows from our most intense chapters of the human experience.

Peace & Remembrance – Maureen Shea, ACSW

A guide for parents whose baby dies in a newborn intensive care unit

A lovingly written book that begins with the decisions to be made at the hospital, contacting the funeral home, telling your other children, family and friends, grieving, the loss of more than one baby, and concerns.

When the Bough Breaks – Bobbi Junior

Is more than a story about devastating loss. It is a gift of words tracing the heart of a mother through labour, delivery and unanticipated grief. Bobbi’s simplicity of tone draws the reader in and offers a unique and honest insight into the devastation that threatens to turn a mother’s heart inside out. There are no formulas between the covers of this book on how to grieve the loss of a child, no ten easy steps to recovery. There is only truth and encouragement, inspiration and hope as Bobbi and her young family, seek to find a new normal.