An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination (Elizabeth McCracken) and Waiting With Gabriel (Amy Kuebelbeck) were part of the reading that I did after Cara's death and they would be useful for anyone who wanted to do some reading specifically about infant loss, keeping in mind that everyone's story and everyone's pain is unique.

An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination

Replica deals with two children: the first stillborn and the second born healthy. (McCracken front-loads the book this way: "A child dies in this book: a baby. A baby is stillborn. You don't have to tell me how sad that is: it happened to me and my husband, our baby, a son...A baby is born in this book, too. That is to say, a healthy baby, our second child.") This is the more literary of the two and is well-written, although after reading it Janel turned to me and said, "Well, that's a good reminder not to get too self-absorbed."

Waiting with Gabriel

Kuebelbeck links a number of news items from her site, which are also helpful:

• MSNBC: When a baby is destined to die
  "...But the paradox of modern medicine is that knowing doesn’t always mean the outcome will be better. Sometimes you can just see death coming from a long way off..."
• New York Times: A Place to Turn When a Newborn Is Fated to Die
  "...Traditionally, doctors and nurses dealt with babies born with fatal anomalies by whisking them away from their mothers to die. But in the 1970s, a perinatal bereavement movement began offering parents another way to deal with the death of a child at birth, by acknowledging the grief they feel and by creating family and religious rituals around a stillbirth or early death...
  
  “I tell them this will shake up their relationships with their family and friends, it will shake what they believe about the world and their faith,” said the Rev. Peter Lund, a United Church of Christ minister and chaplain of the hospice program at Children’s Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota in Minneapolis.
  
  The questions the experience unearths are the most essential people face, he added. “How does your inner life fare, your relationship with God, as this progresses? How do you deal with everything that comes up? And how does that echo inside you?”"

Find Waiting With Gabriel on Abebooks.
Find An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination on Abebooks.

Related:

• Reflections on the life and death of Caritas Anne, our daughter
• Birthing a Dying Child