“We were waiting to tell my sons until the second trimester,” Kriedman said.
But instead of celebrating the arrival of a new sister for her then four- and six-year-old boys, Kriedman and her husband had to break the news that the baby died and would not be coming home.
“From genetic testing, we knew the baby had a chromosome disorder, but was otherwise healthy,” Kriedman said. “We had no idea we would lose her.”
After working through the tragedy, Kriedman, a freelance writer and editor said the idea of writing about the loss of the baby wouldn’t leave her mind. She remembered how she and her husband shared the news with her sons, telling them that their sister was born too early, so she didn’t live and then struggling to answer their questions.
“I wanted to give other parents a tool to help their families have the discussion about miscarriage,” Kriedman said. “It’s a story about our family but it’s also about how to have the conversation about loss.”
Kriedman told her sons that their sister would always be in their lives, even though she wasn’t physically with them. They planned to celebrate her birthday as a family each year and they named her Olivia.
Kriedman, who grew up with a love of reading and writing, spent many years building a journalism career. After graduating from Miami University, she worked as a copy editor at the Dayton Daily News and, after leaving that job, worked as a freelance writer. She writes occasionally for this newspaper.
“I had written three children’s picture books while I was in college,” Kriedman said. “But they just weren’t ready for publication, and I needed time to develop them.”
Kriedman contacted several agents and national publishing houses but didn’t get much response, so she decided to take a step back and gain some life experience to allow her book writing to happen more organically.
Then came the loss of Olivia and the book she said came to her after she wrote a Dayton Daily News guest column in December of 2020.
“That was the start of the book (the column),” Kriedman said. “I was up two or three nights not sleeping and I knew I wasn’t going to get rest until I got it all out.”
After the column was published, Kriedman began to receive messages from readers who had also experienced miscarriage. She said writing about Olivia was cathartic for her. It not only helped her process her grief but also reignited her passion for writing a book.
“I needed to know that the experience of her death could help other families,” Kriedman said. “I wanted something positive to come from this devastating situation.”
Kriedman decided to self-publish Saying Goodbye to Olivia and worked with a company called Chilidog Press and publisher Peter Bronson, who not only helped her publish her first book, but also connected her to an illustrator, Lawrence Goodridge. It published in March.
“A miscarriage can happen for any reason at any time,” Kriedman said. “This first book focuses on what the miscarriage meant to our family and how we look now as we move forward.”
Now working on her second book, designed to be a companion to the first that will focus on why the baby died, Kriedman said it will be geared to a slightly older audience but will still be a children’s book.
“It took me 13 months from start to finish for the first book,” Kriedman said. “I worked with the publisher on the editing process and then we worked with the illustrator. It’s just a lengthy process to get a book published!”
During the pandemic shutdown in 2020, Kriedman said she completed four new children’s books. And now that she has started writing again, she says she hopes it will be the beginning of a long future of book writing.
“Everyone experiences miscarriage in different ways,” Kriedman said. “For us it was discovering concrete ways to honor Olivia – like drawing pictures or writing a letter. We are doing acts of kindness in memory of her.”
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