A few months into pregnancy, Tamarin learned that the baby she was carrying would not live. Over the sleepless weeks that followed, Tamarin, her husband and their three-year-old son tried to navigate the unfamiliar waters of anticipatory sorrow and prepare for what was to come.
The book, which will be published by The Indigo Press in February 2024, is a moving account of anticipatory grief, the 72 minutes of her son Gabriel’s life, and silent maternity leave.
Tamarin reflected: “Writing this book has been a joy and a solace. It tells the story of travelling to the very edge of human experience and discovering, at that terrifying precipice, a new landscape of hope and possibility.
“I hope you will feel in its pages the rush of love I felt, and the power of myth and poetry in the face of the intolerable. I am so proud to see Gabriel’s book take wing in the care of all at Indigo.”
Tamarin is a writer and academic with a background in fine art, whose research interests convene around the intersection of medical humanities, bereavement studies and creativity, including a focus on drawing and life-writing.
She has previously combined her personal experiences and research expertise to create therapeutic writing resources for bereaved parents in collaboration with the baby loss charity Held in Our Hearts and write an essay on the impacts of interventions in neonatal care that saw her win the 2021 Lancet Wakely Essay Prize. More on these achievements can be found in dedicated news stories:
- Bereaved parents encouraged to write as a way of communicating feelings