Selecting a name for your beloved baby is important.  This is true for families experiencing birth in any trimester.

Every year we release thousands of teeny, degradable paper hearts that are handscribed with our beloved babies’ names.  It is free to include your babies’ names.  It is free to attend. Our babies’ legacies are being spread throughout the world, one annual Hearts Release at a time.  

What is your beloved baby’s name?

I will be so very honored to handwrite your babies’ names to be held along with my own baby’s name. -Heidi Faith, stillbirthday founder 

You can learn about the history of the Hearts Release, follow along our facebook page for event details and you can share your beloved babies’ names to be included. Heidi Faith, the founder of stillbirthday, handwrites every beloved baby’s name shared here and on stillbirthday social media accounts (FB, IG, X). 

2027

Celebrate our 16th annual Hearts Release with us! 

Every year since 2011, stillbirthday has been intentional with our messaging about our heart work of releasing. From Germany, France, and Canada, and in the United States, from Florida, Kansas, California, Missouri, Texas, Wisconsin, Wyoming, and Arizona, we’ve held intentional space and time in Hearts Release ceremony. We’ve opened our Hearts Release in Stillbirthday Birth and Bereavement Doulas® leading events across the world, we’ve guided stillbirthday community members in developing events; rather than a single event, we’ve allowed the Hearts Release to become available for members of the stillbirthday healing community to experience our own Hearts Release in both a global and personal way like never before, receiving our very own wee Heart to handwrite our own beloved baby’s name or a message of love for them, to be released in a place and way of our own choosing.

Every year has a different thematic emphasis of our Hearts Release and healing journeys.

Has your grief ever brought you to feeling wildly isolated, betrayed or abandoned, even, even in the midst of a crowd? 

Most recently, in 2026, stillbirthday founder Heidi Faith quietly, carefully, revisited every single beloved baby’s name ever shared with stillbirthday – pausing, to not seek to receive any more, but to hold space in pause – to handwrite our beloved babies’ names and, without any fanfare and with deliberate silence, elevated our beloved babies’ names from a hidden, wide open and lonely place into the night sky. Hearts met by the bitter chill of gusts in the darkness, our beloved babies’ names rising, rising, rising, secured for just a time with delicate but tenacious tissue paper, warmed by the glow of a single battery operated tea candle secured to a kite. On scraped land, running through thickets and hardened red mud, Hearts lifted, rose through impossible darkness. And then, as the tissue tore free, the land received fluttering Hearts, and the occasion simply concluded, buoyed by invisible string so that the kite could return to the earth. This quiet act of solitude and solidarity was especially needed as a lesson and work in her own life, as she continues to consider the inherent, everlasting value of life and the universalities and individualities, the excruciating loneliness and supernaturally soothing validation we may find in parental bereavement.

Indeed, as the founder of stillbirthday and as a healing mother, Heidi Faith continues to explore and experience the devastating invisibleness of sorrow and the relentness confrontation of silence we may each endure as we navigate our healing journeys.

In anticipation of 2027, the thematic message of our 16th Hearts Release is held in great deliberation. 

Somewhat counterintuitively, the purpose of our grief work is in fact to transition into healing – an invisible pregnancy itself, this grief -though so too we face another separation from what we come to know to be true as we dare to become familiar with our healing. We may laugh again, though heartbreak stays and so laughter is never felt quite the same again. We may get pregnant again, though in any lifetime or universe there is no replacement for our beloved babies, our children who are not here with us in all the ways our hearts yearn for. We may one uneventful day help our grandchildren create their first, crayon-etched family tree and we may sigh one of those elder people’s sighs, a release of knowing and holding love, and we may or may not speak the names of the invisible spaces.

What will our future hold, as we continue to grow in our healing? 

Like a Sweet 16, let us anticipate the 2027 Hearts Release being a time of curiosity, bravery, and connection.

You can email heidi.faith@stillbirthday.com to share your beloved babies’ names, or find more details on our facebook page.