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Emma Hansen Books

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“What happens when the order of birth and death are disrupted? Stillbirth goes against the way most people think about life and death, and the timeline in which they occur. It's unsettling. When death takes a life before birth, is it a life? I don't know. I don't think there will ever be an answer that feels certain, or one that is right for everyone. But right here, right now, I wonder, is it really just a single breath of air that creates a life? And the absence of it that makes a death?”

DeathLossGriefBirthStillbirthChild Loss
Book:Still: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Motherhood
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“I never know when I'll sense Reid's presence. It isn't in a toothbrush left behind or a frequently worn item of clothing. It's in the absences that I feel him most. It's everywhere that I had imagined he'd one day be. For me, he is more than a body. I knew the soul, not the flesh. When I look at photos of him, I miss him, but not in the same way I miss him when I look at photos of myself pregnant. He is a feeling. He is a feeling more than anything because of the simple fact that he died before he was born. Because he was stillborn. He is not defined by this, but the definition matters. I was meant to be his portal, the one that would lead him from his world into ours, but he left for another world, one altogether foreign to me.”

LossGriefStillbirthChild Loss
Book:Still: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Motherhood
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