PHOTO: HANS DEREK / NATIONAL POST

"I never thought that the most important path I would walk would be the one that taught me how to love; or that I had to lose the chance to love in order to find my way, stumbling, tear-blind into it"

Shadow Child is a beautifully wrought exploration of selfhood, womanhood, and mother hood, and of the way life hones, pares, and humbles each of us. It is an affirmation that we are shaped by our pain as surely as we are shaped by our joy, and that there is beauty in both.

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Chapters Books "Canadian Feature of the month"

Maclean's Best Seller list.

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US edition coming out in February 2000 with Carroll &Graf, NYC.

"Tenacious, unsparing, in anguish sometimes, but mostly with moving lyricism, Beth Powning pursues and completes what she calls her "apprenticeship in love and loss" , a long and not easy journey that we all, women and men, in our way, try to carry through."

Ernest Hillen, author of Small Mercies: A Boy After War

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Shadow Child: An Apprenticeship in Love and Loss

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 From the National Post - Feb. 16, 1999

Nothing prepared Beth Powning for the death of her child.

Not even the summer she spent as a rebellious young woman working with a youth group in a village in Mexico. A baby died, and Powning, 18 years old, from a middle-class, North American culture, went to the funeral. Walking into the tiny house with a dirt floor and a fire in the middle, she noticed a cradle with a doll in it. The family was waving flies away and caressing it. With shock, she realized it was their baby.

Seven years later, Powning gave birth to a stillborn son. There was no cause of death. She never saw her child; no lock of hair, no foot-print, no memorial marked his passing. Tate, she called him, and she and her husband left the maternity ward where she had lain recovering, surrounded by happy mothers, and returned home, bewildered and numb. A few weeks later, a plain brown carton arrived in the mail. It was her baby's ashes.

Powning went on to have a healthy baby boy. But Tate's memory never left her, "insubstantial as a shadow, casting a vague, disturbing chill across the sunny places of my heart," the New Brunswick author and photographer writes in her haunting new memoir, "Shadow Child: An apprenticeship in Love and Loss."

"You want people to come up to you and say, I'm so sorry you lost your baby," Powning, 49, is explaining in her soft, considered voice, in the formal splendour of Toronto's King Edward Hotel, a long way from her working farm near Sussex, NB. "One of the really strange things is that from the moment our baby was born, we became parents. But we weren't. But we were. Childbirth is this enormous initiation that a woman goes through, and you're profoundly changed. You want to be acknowledged as a mother. But there was no baby. And nobody would speak of it because they thought they would cause me too much pain."

We reel at the death of a child. But why does stillbirth evoke such a particular dread? In writing "Shadow Child", Powning thought deeply about her experience. "I think there's a kind of taboo about stillbirth," she says. "When you know somebody who's lived a long life and they die, it's very sad and you grieve. But there's something to talk about; you can share your memories. But with stillbirth, you have literally given birth to death. There is nothing to talk about but death itself. And people can't deal with that.

"In the village in Mexico, there was a sense of acceptance. This baby died and this is part of our life. We are going to come together and cry about it," she says. "Whereas in my time, and in my cultural background, it was thought that we should whisk this away and try to pretend it didn't happen. But women who have had stillborn babies feel profound, terrible grief."

And yet, as Powning discovered in her research, most never learn why their babies died. There's no disease, no defect. "It would be easier if you knew why," she says. "You become obsessed with why. And there's no answer. So it turns back on you. You feel 'infected'. You bury a guilt, this profound sense that this was my fault.

"Men suffer terribly for these things too," she adds. "A friend told me that when she was a child, her mother had a baby, stillborn, and they always called him by name when they were growing up. And when her father died his last words were, 'I'm going to see our baby in heaven!". Powning's husband went into a kind of manic state, filling the emptiness with projects.

"In my case," she says, "I came to realize I was bearing this image of a hostile and accusing figure, my shadow child, who had decided, 'You really weren't worthy of being my mother. I decided not to be born.'"

Only years later, after a breakdown and a course of therapy, did Powning come to understand her shadow child as a vessel for her own conflicts and struggles, hopes and dreams. As she allowed Tate to emerge from the shadows, so did a sense of joy and renewal and her real, true self. "I think if I had seen and spent time with my baby, I wouldn't have felt the guilt so strongly. But I don't feel that way any more. And that's a great, freeing feeling."

Growing up in rural Connecticut, Powning was blanketed by the most profound parental love, wanting for nothing. "Life wraps around me like strong arms . . .The sun is with me all day, like a friend," she writes in "Shadow Child". Sometimes I have sort of a guilty feeling that I did have such a privileged childhood," she says. "I had to come to terms with this as a writer, because I grew up thinking, well, you can't write unless you've had some kind of extreme life. And then I realized, no, we all have our stories and they're all valuable - I don't care if you're Frank McCourt or whoever. And if we want to tell them, we tell them."

While pursuing a liberal arts degree at Sarah Lawrence College, in New York, she went out on a blind date with a young artist named Peter Powning and felt an instant spark; the spark became current, and they married the next year. A few years later, they picked up and moved to Canada, dreaming of living off the land. "We wanted to hold the earth in our hands and make it work for us; we wanted to know, first-hand, the power that moves the stars," she wrote in her first book, "Seeds of Another Summer", a collection of nature photography and prose. The Pownings had the Peace River in Alberta in mind, but their car gave out, so they settled on 250 acres near Sussex where they remain today.

"I just can't imagine life without a garden and a pony in the pasture and the forest and dogs and cats and walking in the woods every day," she says, calmly nursing her grapefruit juice. In between ploughing, planting, harvesting, hammering, grinding flour, baking bread, making jam, milking the cow, raising her son, Jacob, and helping her husband in his pottery studio, she made time to write.

Though she seemingly burst on to the scene three years ago with "Seeds of Another Summer", she says she had been writing for years. "I served my apprenticeship. I have bags and bags of short stories." Her writing teacher at Sarah Lawrence, E.L. Doctorow, had taught her that good writing is about telling the truth. "Of course, telling the truth sometimes takes years of living to be able to do it," she says, smiling.

"Shadow Child" rings of the truth. Intimate, generous, but never confessional, Powning, in shimmering prose, comes to understand love and loss as "inseparable as light and dark, and that one does not exist without the other." There is so much here, a celebration of selfhood, grief and renewal, and the spiritual solace of nature, that it would be a shame if readers turned away because of the sombreness of the subject. One thing it isn't is therapy on the page. "I didn't want to write that kind of book," she says. "I wanted to write something other people can feel is theirs; that it's not just me, this is bigger.

"Last week I found a letter tucked into my mailbox from one of my neighbours," Powning recalls bundling up to head out into the chill of the day. "She's in her 60's now, and wasn't able to say that baby's name until two years ago. And I thought, I couldn't say our baby's name. I have always felt so guilty that I couldn't, but I realized I'm not alone," she muses in wonder, as the winter sun streams down on her radiant face. "The minute I read that letter, that little piece of my guilt just flew away."