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Three Minus One: Stories of Parents' Love and Loss
Three Minus One: Parents’ Stories of Love and Loss is a collection of intimate, soul-baring stories and artwork by parents who have lost a child to stillbirth, miscarriage, or neonatal death, inspired by the film Return to Zero.
The loss of a child is unlike any other, and the impact that it has on the mother, the father, their family, and their friends is devastating—a shockwave of pain and guilt that spreads through their entire community. But the majority of those affected, especially mothers, often suffer their pain in silence, convinced that their grief and trauma is theirs to bear alone. This anthology of raw memoirs, heartbreaking stories, truthful poems, beautiful painting, and stunning photography from the parents who have suffered child loss offers insight into this unique, devastating and life-changing experience—breaking the silence and offering a ray of hope to the many parents out there in search of answers, understanding, and healing.
The loss of a child is unlike any other, and the impact that it has on the mother, the father, their family, and their friends is devastating—a shockwave of pain and guilt that spreads through their entire community. But the majority of those affected, especially mothers, often suffer their pain in silence, convinced that their grief and trauma is theirs to bear alone. This anthology of raw memoirs, heartbreaking stories, truthful poems, beautiful painting, and stunning photography from the parents who have suffered child loss offers insight into this unique, devastating and life-changing experience—breaking the silence and offering a ray of hope to the many parents out there in search of answers, understanding, and healing.
- GenresGriefNonfiction
332 pages, Kindle Edition
First published April 19, 2014
12 people are currently reading
137 people want to read
About the author
Dafna Michaelson Jenet
7 books20 followers“There was a little girl and she had a little curl right in the middle of her forehead. When she was good she was very, very good, when she was bad she was…” Sure, you know the rest. When Dafna Michaelson Jenet was growing up her mother and grandmother both loved to sing that song to wavy haired Dafna. Her matriarchs being the two greatest influences in her life, Dafna exchanged the ending of that verse with: adventurous, risk taking, life altering, passion living, difference making.
Dafna’s book “It takes a little crazy to make a difference” is about jumping off the path and hitting the road for the 52 weeks of one year to visit all 50 US states and forging a new life built on telling the empowering stories of ordinary people solving problems in their communities, neighborhoods, businesses, lives, and one by one changing the world. She can teach you to do the same. Whether you have curls or not, Dafna will illuminate the path to the power you possess to change your story.
Dafna Michaelson is the founder and Journeywoman behind the 50 in 52 Journey in which she traveled to all 50 United States and Washington D.C within the 52 weeks of one year to find, highlight, and elevate ordinary people doing extraordinary things, solving problems and building community.
As an Author, Speaker, TEDx speaker and TEDxCrestmoorpark Curator, Dafna continues the work she began with the 50in52 Journey to inspire others to action. She does not simply speak to her audiences, she elevates, empowers, and engages them through storytelling, motivational recounting of her nationwide journey, and inspires them to action so that they too can be empowered to make changes in their communities, their workplaces, their families, and their lives.
Dafna received her MBA from the Daniels College of Business in 2001, and is the President and Founder of the Journey Institute. Dafna works with small business owners, entrepreneurs and educational faculties to strengthen the core operations of their business settings through motivating their human talent. Dafna utilizes systems she developed following her travels to all 50 states to find the secrets accomplished problem solvers use to create success in workplace and community.
Dafna has been interviewed by the late Maya Angelou and has been featured by CBS Sunday Morning, the Denver Post, NPR and CNN.com. She has traveled around the world to empower people of all ages into action.
Her greatest achievement was being lucky enough to parent her children. She aspires to be as creative and colorful as they are and to write in as engaging a fashion as they do. Dafna and her husband live and work in Colorado. They spend most of their days about 10 feet away from each other. Just like she likes it!!
Dafna’s book “It takes a little crazy to make a difference” is about jumping off the path and hitting the road for the 52 weeks of one year to visit all 50 US states and forging a new life built on telling the empowering stories of ordinary people solving problems in their communities, neighborhoods, businesses, lives, and one by one changing the world. She can teach you to do the same. Whether you have curls or not, Dafna will illuminate the path to the power you possess to change your story.
Dafna Michaelson is the founder and Journeywoman behind the 50 in 52 Journey in which she traveled to all 50 United States and Washington D.C within the 52 weeks of one year to find, highlight, and elevate ordinary people doing extraordinary things, solving problems and building community.
As an Author, Speaker, TEDx speaker and TEDxCrestmoorpark Curator, Dafna continues the work she began with the 50in52 Journey to inspire others to action. She does not simply speak to her audiences, she elevates, empowers, and engages them through storytelling, motivational recounting of her nationwide journey, and inspires them to action so that they too can be empowered to make changes in their communities, their workplaces, their families, and their lives.
Dafna received her MBA from the Daniels College of Business in 2001, and is the President and Founder of the Journey Institute. Dafna works with small business owners, entrepreneurs and educational faculties to strengthen the core operations of their business settings through motivating their human talent. Dafna utilizes systems she developed following her travels to all 50 states to find the secrets accomplished problem solvers use to create success in workplace and community.
Dafna has been interviewed by the late Maya Angelou and has been featured by CBS Sunday Morning, the Denver Post, NPR and CNN.com. She has traveled around the world to empower people of all ages into action.
Her greatest achievement was being lucky enough to parent her children. She aspires to be as creative and colorful as they are and to write in as engaging a fashion as they do. Dafna and her husband live and work in Colorado. They spend most of their days about 10 feet away from each other. Just like she likes it!!
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
August 6, 2016
Disclosure note: I am one of the contributors to this anthology.
In July 2009, my first pregnancy ended at eleven weeks. In July 2012, my second pregnancy ended at ten weeks. There will be no others. Those experiences--as well as the years of baffling infertility that preceded the losses, the attempts at adoption, the anger and hope, resolution and relief, the sense of a life unfinished and unfulfilled--have shaped me as an adult. They have affected me as a woman, a writer, as the mother I will always believe I was meant to be, as a wife who shares forever-grief with her husband.
In 2005, the wife of writer-producer Sean Hanish gave birth to a stillborn son. In their journey through sorrow and healing, Sean wrote the screenplay for a film. That film, Return to Zero, starring Minnie Driver and Paul Adelstein, premieres worldwide on Lifetime Network, Saturday May 17, 2014, 8:00 p.m. EDT. Return to Zero. Sean's original intention was to see this film distributed on the big screen. But realizing he would reach a vastly greater audience on a solid television network, he signed on with Lifetime at the Rome Independent Film Festival in Italy earlier this year. Bravo, Sean. Congratulations for your brave and beautiful work.
In tandem with the release of the movie and in the spirit of shattering the silence surrounding neonatal death, stillbirth, and miscarriage, Sean and Brook Warner, editor of She Writes Press, conceived an anthology of prose and poetry. Three Minus One: Stories of Parents' Love & Loss is the result of their collaboration and our--the contributors'--journeys.
This collection of essays and poems speaks of pain and loss so profound, you are left breathless. Yet there is also incredible beauty, joy, and redemption. I can't get over so many things as I read: how extraordinary the writing is, how unique each voice, yet how similar the experiences and emotions, and how profoundly relieved I am to know I am not alone. How baffled I am that I felt so alone for so long.
In just a few lines Heather Bell's poem, Executioner, captures the absurdity of grief--the acknowledgement that life goes on, even as yours is falling apart, and the strange, sad ways people react--trying so hard to empathize, to understand, and botching it all, bless their hearts:
Gabriela Ibarra Kotara reveals the Masters of Disguise that grieving parents become after the loss of a child: "I am that cautionary tale. No one wants what happened to us to happen to them." In Address Book, Meagan Golec reflects on how her friendships have changed since her child was born dead at 38.5 weeks. Elizabeth Heineman's What to Do When They Bring You Your Dead Baby in the Hospital is a tender, beautiful, elegiac prose-poem that I read over and over, wanting to sink inside her words. Marina del Vecchio Silent Miscarriage, Shoshanna Kirk, To Balance Bitter, Add Sweet, and Susan Rukeyser, Our Bloody Secret made me realize that I was not crazy for wanting to miscarry in my body's own time, even though it took weeks--the first time-- or left me writhing on the floor for hours, hyperventilating in pain--the second time--and that searching in the mass of blood and tissue for signs of your child's body is horribly, gruesomely, okay.
All this death and loss is not a thing you talk about--not in polite company. Not with strangers and rarely even with friends. And yet, death brought me to life. The deaths of my children brought me at last to the page, to be the other thing I've always known I was meant to be: a writer. Isn't that strange and awful and wonderful? I can't fulfill one destiny, but in its denial, I am walking the road of another. My essay Their Names touches on the discovery of another way to create life.
Miscarriage affects an astonishing number of would-be parents: an estimated 30% of pregnancies ends in loss. Mercifully, many of these occur so early that the mother doesn't know she was pregnant. But sadly, many of us spend weeks and months planning for and anticipating life. Stillbirth occurs in 1 of every 160 births in the US and neonatal death--death within the first 28 days of life--1 in every 85 births. Shocking, isn't it? It's probably happened to someone you know. If and when it does, a simple "I'm so sorry for your loss" and a hug would be a beautiful gift. Offering this book would be such a lovely gesture, as well. Parents in mourning need to know they are not alone. This book offers all the right things to say and do and feel and not feel. It is an embrace of compassion and empathy.
In July 2009, my first pregnancy ended at eleven weeks. In July 2012, my second pregnancy ended at ten weeks. There will be no others. Those experiences--as well as the years of baffling infertility that preceded the losses, the attempts at adoption, the anger and hope, resolution and relief, the sense of a life unfinished and unfulfilled--have shaped me as an adult. They have affected me as a woman, a writer, as the mother I will always believe I was meant to be, as a wife who shares forever-grief with her husband.
In 2005, the wife of writer-producer Sean Hanish gave birth to a stillborn son. In their journey through sorrow and healing, Sean wrote the screenplay for a film. That film, Return to Zero, starring Minnie Driver and Paul Adelstein, premieres worldwide on Lifetime Network, Saturday May 17, 2014, 8:00 p.m. EDT. Return to Zero. Sean's original intention was to see this film distributed on the big screen. But realizing he would reach a vastly greater audience on a solid television network, he signed on with Lifetime at the Rome Independent Film Festival in Italy earlier this year. Bravo, Sean. Congratulations for your brave and beautiful work.
In tandem with the release of the movie and in the spirit of shattering the silence surrounding neonatal death, stillbirth, and miscarriage, Sean and Brook Warner, editor of She Writes Press, conceived an anthology of prose and poetry. Three Minus One: Stories of Parents' Love & Loss is the result of their collaboration and our--the contributors'--journeys.
This collection of essays and poems speaks of pain and loss so profound, you are left breathless. Yet there is also incredible beauty, joy, and redemption. I can't get over so many things as I read: how extraordinary the writing is, how unique each voice, yet how similar the experiences and emotions, and how profoundly relieved I am to know I am not alone. How baffled I am that I felt so alone for so long.
In just a few lines Heather Bell's poem, Executioner, captures the absurdity of grief--the acknowledgement that life goes on, even as yours is falling apart, and the strange, sad ways people react--trying so hard to empathize, to understand, and botching it all, bless their hearts:
And the baby is dead but
we need lettuce in the house, maybe some bread
for morning toast so
I am at the store touching the potatoes at the spin,
the slim wrists of carrot. And the baby is dead so
this entitles humans to talk about their dog's death,
or gerbil's. This means I am expected to sympathize at
their loss. Because all death becomes, somehow, equal
Gabriela Ibarra Kotara reveals the Masters of Disguise that grieving parents become after the loss of a child: "I am that cautionary tale. No one wants what happened to us to happen to them." In Address Book, Meagan Golec reflects on how her friendships have changed since her child was born dead at 38.5 weeks. Elizabeth Heineman's What to Do When They Bring You Your Dead Baby in the Hospital is a tender, beautiful, elegiac prose-poem that I read over and over, wanting to sink inside her words. Marina del Vecchio Silent Miscarriage, Shoshanna Kirk, To Balance Bitter, Add Sweet, and Susan Rukeyser, Our Bloody Secret made me realize that I was not crazy for wanting to miscarry in my body's own time, even though it took weeks--the first time-- or left me writhing on the floor for hours, hyperventilating in pain--the second time--and that searching in the mass of blood and tissue for signs of your child's body is horribly, gruesomely, okay.
All this death and loss is not a thing you talk about--not in polite company. Not with strangers and rarely even with friends. And yet, death brought me to life. The deaths of my children brought me at last to the page, to be the other thing I've always known I was meant to be: a writer. Isn't that strange and awful and wonderful? I can't fulfill one destiny, but in its denial, I am walking the road of another. My essay Their Names touches on the discovery of another way to create life.
Miscarriage affects an astonishing number of would-be parents: an estimated 30% of pregnancies ends in loss. Mercifully, many of these occur so early that the mother doesn't know she was pregnant. But sadly, many of us spend weeks and months planning for and anticipating life. Stillbirth occurs in 1 of every 160 births in the US and neonatal death--death within the first 28 days of life--1 in every 85 births. Shocking, isn't it? It's probably happened to someone you know. If and when it does, a simple "I'm so sorry for your loss" and a hug would be a beautiful gift. Offering this book would be such a lovely gesture, as well. Parents in mourning need to know they are not alone. This book offers all the right things to say and do and feel and not feel. It is an embrace of compassion and empathy.
June 29, 2014
Powerful heartbreaking, validating. This book helps break the silence around baby loss, a silence that needs to be shattered.
May 15, 2017
I really enjoyed that the book gave a voice to so many parents who have experienced infant loss, stillbirth and miscarriage. I feel that there are a good number of people today who don't understand mourning for a child that was never given the chance to live outside of the mother's womb. Even those that seem to understand want to put a time limit on how long a parent can "acceptably" mourn. There are still those who think it's socially intolerable to even speak of such things let alone grieve for a child that was never living on Earth. This book gave light to so many parents and others who may not have had an outlet to explore their grief otherwise.
May 19, 2019
Beautiful, touching collection of stories.
January 1, 2015
The stories were primarily by parents but there were a few by other family members, such as grandparents, as well. I expected the sadness but was surprised by the hopefulness many stories ended with.
There was a pattern for the mothers of children lost in utero. Most had a sentence along the lines of "a good mom would know when it had happened", feeling guilty when they were shocked to discover no heartbeat and/or her baby had passed away between appointments. Hopefully by sharing their stories and seeing they're not alone in their feelings, they can find peace and take that weight off their heavy shoulders.
There is a documentary, Return to Zero, and a blog, The Return to Zero Project, that I plan to look at as well.
A Few Quotes from the Book
"For those of you who are afraid to turn the page - terrified of the horrors that you might find - I hope you will understand that at its very essence this is a book about love.
Love for our children who we lost but for whom that love endures.
Love in our hearts for the beautiful lives which were here with us for only a brief time but which left and indelible impression and a lifetime of memories.
Love for those beautiful ones who are, and will forever be, our precious children.
"Being pregnant is like carrying the future inside you. This collection of cells spinning into life was not merely the tiny blurred body on the sonogram, it was all the things this baby might grow to be: the little blonde girl who looks like her sister; the toddler who stumbles forward on shaky legs; the kindergartner and the college student, the bride, the CEO. Imagination melds into reality the instant the pregnancy test reveals two pink lines." ~ from the story Called to Motherhood by Stacy Clark
Find all my reviews at:
http://readingatrandom.blogspot.com/
There was a pattern for the mothers of children lost in utero. Most had a sentence along the lines of "a good mom would know when it had happened", feeling guilty when they were shocked to discover no heartbeat and/or her baby had passed away between appointments. Hopefully by sharing their stories and seeing they're not alone in their feelings, they can find peace and take that weight off their heavy shoulders.
There is a documentary, Return to Zero, and a blog, The Return to Zero Project, that I plan to look at as well.
A Few Quotes from the Book
"For those of you who are afraid to turn the page - terrified of the horrors that you might find - I hope you will understand that at its very essence this is a book about love.
Love for our children who we lost but for whom that love endures.
Love in our hearts for the beautiful lives which were here with us for only a brief time but which left and indelible impression and a lifetime of memories.
Love for those beautiful ones who are, and will forever be, our precious children.
"Being pregnant is like carrying the future inside you. This collection of cells spinning into life was not merely the tiny blurred body on the sonogram, it was all the things this baby might grow to be: the little blonde girl who looks like her sister; the toddler who stumbles forward on shaky legs; the kindergartner and the college student, the bride, the CEO. Imagination melds into reality the instant the pregnancy test reveals two pink lines." ~ from the story Called to Motherhood by Stacy Clark
Find all my reviews at:
http://readingatrandom.blogspot.com/
June 3, 2014
This compilation is written by parents and family members who have suffered from still birth, infant death, and miscarriage. It is heart wrenching and beautiful. It is full of poems, essays, and tributes to so many lives ended too soon. Highly recommended, especially for those dealing with such difficult circumstances, or for those wanting to better understand, in light of the grief of a friend or loved one.
June 27, 2014
A great compilation of stories that let you know you are not alone in the journey that this book is about.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews