Mary Shelley is an ongoing CiaoLapo project that uses books and reading as tools to reflect on perinatal grief, grieving, the pitfalls of the grieving process, but also the resources, which we don’t always know we have, when we are going through grief. Part of this project are the activities of the reading group, which meets online about every two months, and the bibliotherapy course.
Initiatives are for members and associates only.
“Reading is a relationship with ourselves and not only with the book,
With our inner world through the world the book opens to us.”
Italo Calvino
When my son was born after he died, I felt like I was catapulted into another dimension: our future ripped to shreds, we hurled, in the space of a second, into a parallel dimension, completely lost. They were not helpful, as I wrote in the book Small Principles: going through per inatal grief about the early days of perinatal bereavement, the people who rushed to tell us that “these things are rare, they almost never happen” and that “more children would come along” “to stop thinking about it, that that was it now”: the transition from expectation to loss had been so lacerating that it was impossible for us to simply resume our life, the one before, as if nothing had happened. We needed to understand, we needed to share, we needed to not feel like we were the only ones in the world grappling with a child who first dies and then is born.
Seeking information was the first step in measuring ourselves against our new life (and trying to take back at least a piece of our old one, I confess).
In 2006 it was very difficult to find articles or books on perinatal mourning in Italian, because perinatal mourning was still a huge taboo and the topic was not addressed, by anyone or at any time. In addition, there were not yet social (hi, I’m Wilma, and I’m writing to you from prehistory), which in the 1910s helped spread a lot of information about perinatal grief on both facebook and instagram. In 2006, however, it seemed that no babies died in utero, that our feeling was ours alone, and that no one had felt the need to write about this topic.
I needed to seek myself, reflect myself, and maybe partly find myself in the words of other women, other couples with our experience. It seemed impossible that no one had written about an issue that affects five million women around the world every year. And so I started looking in the two languages I know, Italian and English, for anything that had been written about perinatal grief and grieving.
My research has given rise to a library fund, which collects essays, novels, anthologies, poetry books, and picture books that can tell the story of perinatal grief, and which is located at CiaoLapo House
Over the years, I have also selected the essays, novels, and poetry collections that have accompanied the journey of grieving women and families more than others: this selection, which I have called #librichefannobene, contains works that are able to open reflections, and touch people deeply, allowing for a feeling and thinking that fosters the integration of experiences and the opening of new spaces of meaning. In exchange for a donation, on this page you can receive one or more texts that are part of the selection.
The growing awareness around perinatal grief, in Italy and in the rest of the world, has allowed over the years to make this topic certainly more “sayable” and “writable,” thus finally more shareable: no longer a big taboo, no longer a niche topic.
Nowadays, well-written short stories or novels are also available for our market that deal with this complex and multifaceted topic, give voice to the different types of grief, the difficulties and resources that protagonists and protagonists are called upon to face after loss, and also the pitfalls and ambivalences involved in living in the parallel dimension.
To attend reading group meetings and bibliotherapy track meetings, you must be registered as a parent member for the current year: you can sign up here.
