The Grief Sessions #4: "I Feel You in my Heart," A Mother's Memoir of Love, Grief, and Healing with Lorraine Ash
“The journey is propelled by the questions you ask. So I cannot sit here and say ‘Why me? Why did this happen? Oh my god…’ because it doesn’t lead anywhere. So I ask, “What now? What do I do with this? This is my fate. So let’s live it. What’s the next step of living this?’”
Journalist, memoirist, and author Lorraine Ash shares with us her experience of losing her daughter just before birth, and her subsequent journey “through the land of love and grief” to heal, recover, and move forward.
Meet This Episode's Guest
Lorraine Ash
Lorraine Ash started her professional life as a long-form journalist writing long narrative stories—exploratory reports, cover stories, and series. Her journalistic life led her to the White House, homeless shelters, disaster zones, psychiatric wards, forests, caves, and castles. Lorraine has interviewed astronauts, Olympians, economic gurus, politicians, doctors, artists and, perhaps most importantly, ordinary people. Her articles, which won twenty-six writing awards over the years, appeared in newspapers nationwide, including USA Today.
A love of American history led to Lorraine penning three historical plays about American presidents—Tyler, Monroe, and Jackson—published by The History Project. She has also produced numerous short stories and essays for literary journals and anthologies. These include Tiferet, Cairn, Journeys, Ducts, Recovering the Self: A Journal of Hope and Healing, and Steeped in the World of Tea.
In midlife a significant event changed her: her daughter and only child, was stillborn in June 1999. Suddenly Lorraine understood the importance of telling stories from the inside out. She wrote Life Touches Life: A Mother’s Story of Stillbirth and Healing (NewSage Press), a memoir that has reached stillbirth mothers in the United States, the Middle East, Australia, Europe, China, Canada, and Mexico.
Next came the spiritual midlife memoir, Self and Soul: On Creating a Meaningful Life (Cape House Books).
Ever since, she has ventured ever deeper into the book world, where long-form writing migrated after the implosion of print newspapers and magazines. Lorraine has worked one-on-one with more than sixty writers to either ghostwrite, edit, or coach their book manuscripts into existence.
Lorraine’s mission is to facilitate quality storytelling. The world needs quality stories. It needs yours. It needs you to witness your corner of existence lest someone else do that for you—and get it wrong.
Find out more about Lorraine’s work, upcoming workshops and more on her website http://lorraineash.com/home.htm