Every year, the Hearts Release holds a special, meaningful thematic message, reflecting a specific aspect experienced by some within the healing community.
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. There are parts of our stories, our journeys, even with the best, closest of support, we’d clasp our hands over in secrecy and shame. Mothers who’ve faced elective abortion, medical termination, any language that conveys an excruciating decision. Mothers, adjacent to our healing community, who’ve chosen adoption for their beloved children. Mothers who hold record with inappropriately precise scrutiny and unjust cruelty of their ever stepping foot outside of perfectly flat ground. Any messages of warm balm or reprieve or validation or righteousness or rightness if even ever offered, muted and cut cold by the cacophony of shame, wrongness, and silence the world and you project onto yourself. Any message of accountability and opportunity even meant in love adding to the weight of backfill after you’ve already died a million times every minute since entering this grief.
Hearts met by the bitter chill of gusts in the darkness, our beloved babies’ names rising, rising, rising, out of this seemingly God-forsaken grave, 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. A flimsy, thin piece of material pressed taut and outstretched, trembling in the elements, forced to find its gumption to rise through. Rise through. Rise through. On scraped, broken, unsteady land, running, galoshes stomping, clumsily through unkempt thickets and hardened red mud, Hearts lifted, rose through impossible darkness. And then, as the tissue tore free, the land received fluttering, creme colored Hearts like a celestial event of shooting stars or the season’s first, quiet snowfall. Collapsing, heaving, white breath billowing, legs hot and cheeks cold, laying, still, overwhelmed and undone, in this space where life and death collide, still pondering the uncertainty if our most intimate, darkest, hardest moments call for a swaddling blanket or burial shroud, any gesture of comfort feeling cast into a void, resounding truly as thin and unprotecting as a veil where any one’s gravest horrors are confronted by their exact nemeses of hope, a burial place and birth space, microscopically and macrocosmically, our wombs, and, this world, both. Where is the evidence of a life lived and lost if not in the flailing defiance of a bewildered mother stricken by bereavement? A surely erratic spectacle yet profound vulnerability of an occasion simply concluded, buoyed by invisible string, tugging in the darkness, bringing the kite back to the earth.
I don’t visit a grave and drop flowers. Within me is a tomb and a stone and soil in between. I rise to scatter seeds and weep pails of water and I rustle the wind as I do wrestle that I do look down and I do look up to the author of life with accusations and confessions. To the one who rocks more than the boat as the old adage goes but the whole dang world, is He rocking in a chair while knitting in mystery, who wove my child and wove my heart and weaves all complicated pieces together? I clutch His Comforter tight up to my chin and listen intently, searching for a word of hope to linger through my daily evening sojourn through the valley of shadows and then, from a temporary place of rest, in expectation that the sun that I have come to know and yet do not know will meet with me again, I rip the night sky away from the heavens, and rise through. Rise through. Rise through.
This quiet act of solitude and solidarity was especially needed as a lesson and work in my own life, as I continue to consider the inherent, everlasting value of life and the universalities and individualities, the excruciating loneliness and supernaturally soothing validation any of us may find in our parental bereavement.
Indeed, as the founder of stillbirthday and as a healing mother, I continue to explore and experience the devastating invisibleness of sorrow, the catastrophic abyss of darkness, the relentness confrontation of silence, and the impossibilities of our finding sense and light and meaning and hope we may each endeavor toward, evermore, as we navigate our healing journeys.
Ongoingly, you are invited to share your beloved babies’ names with stillbirthday, and the founder Heidi Faith continues to handwrite our babies’ names onto teeny, degradable hearts.
