Shannon Gibney's New Book Gives Children Language for Infant Loss
Contributing writer Ella Stern profiles local author Shannon Gibney and her new children's book, "Where Is My Sister?," which follows a young girl named Salome navigating her family's grief after her mother's stillbirth. Gibney, who wrote the book after her own experience with stillbirth, discusses why she found no existing children's literature reflecting what her own kids were going through, and her hope that the book gives children permission to ask hard questions about loss, especially as Black infant mortality remains 95% higher than the national rate.
In her newest work, out last month, local multigenre author Shannon Gibney set out to tackle an issue that is taboo in children’s literature. Her book, “Where Is My Sister?,” is an emotional and thought-out exploration of how families, especially young children, navigate infant loss.
“Where Is My Sister?” follows Salome, a young girl whose mother suffered a stillbirth. Having expected to be an older sister, Salome struggles to understand why the younger sister she had expected did not come home from the hospital with her mother. While undergoing their own grief, Salome’s mother, father and older brother, Gerald, use their distinct approaches to spirituality to help Salome comprehend the loss of her sister, Toni. Salome considers that Toni might be in the spaces between her and Gerald, in her mother’s tears, by her favorite tree. While Gibney does not purport to offer one single solution to this deep loss, Salome concludes that her sister is everywhere.
Gibney wrote “Where Is My Sister?” eight years ago, five years after she herself experienced a stillbirth. While grieving what she described as the worst moment of her life, she watched her kids attempt to process the loss. She found no media representation of what her children were going through.
“As somebody who is always looking at the existing literature and [trying] to find shards of our experiences in books, I really wasn’t coming across anything that adequately conveyed what my children were trying to navigate,” Gibney said. “For that, this book came to me.”
Children understand and interpret experiences on a different level than adults do, and they have received less socialization around what questions they can ask, Gibney said. In “Where Is My Sister?,” Salome’s mother attempts to explain her grief, and Salome asks questions that her parents don’t always expect. Gibney hopes that Salome’s experience gives kids permission to ask questions that they feel scared to ask or don’t know how to voice, and that it can guide them toward possible answers.
“I hope that kids can see themselves in the book,” Gibney continued. “I hope it gives them some language to work with, so that they feel less alone if they are going through this.”
To Gibney, having the words to comprehend and discuss grief is crucial. That can be difficult in a world where people shy away from talking about death and where there are unspoken rules against writing kids’ books about infant loss.
“If people don’t have tools, language [or] context to process those things, it becomes actually a secondary or tertiary trauma,” Gibney said. “There’s the first layer of trauma, which would be the stillbirth, losing the baby. And then the secondary or tertiary trauma is not seeing your experience represented anywhere in the popular culture, and then you start to feel like a freak.”
Gibney also contributed to “What God is Honored Here?,” the first anthology of writing about miscarriage and infant loss by and for women of color. The 2019 anthology is for an adult audience, but has the same goal as “Where Is My Sister?:” giving people words to help them as they grieve. One woman said that the anthology was the only thing that helped her with her infant loss because it showed her that other women of color had not only experienced something similar, but were moving through it.
The representation that “Where Is My Sister?” provides comes as Black infants see a mortality rate 95% higher than that of infants nationwide, according to 2023 data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
“I think in the past five years or so, there’s been a lot more awareness about this disparity, which is good,” Gibney said. “As far as I know, a lot of the numbers have not changed, which is depressing, but really not surprising, given how entrenched racism and sexism are in so many of our systems.”
2022 research by Caleb Jang and Henry Lee reflects this, finding that Black/white infant mortality disparities have remained even as overall infant mortality has declined in recent decades.
As “Where Is My Sister?” goes out into the world, Gibney hopes to see more books, especially secular ones, reflecting experiences of infant loss.
She also wants to see writing “really just being honest about [the topic],” Gibney said. “Which is never easy, and it’s messy, and multifaceted, and, a lot of times, painful. But as I tell my students: if we’re not telling the truth in our work, why do it?”
To purchase “Where Is My Sister?” visit https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517911454/where-is-my-sister/. For more information on author Shannon Gibney, visit www.shannongibney.com/.
Ella Stern is a contributing writer for the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder. She welcomes reader responses at erstern10@gmail.com. She welcomes reader responses at ellastern10@gmail.com.