We recently connected with Kristy Boike and have shared our conversation below.

Kristy , appreciate you joining us today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

I lost my mother to cancer a few years ago and that loss completely devastated my family. She had just turned 60 and my parents were just starting to talk retirement and plans. I had also just had my fourth child and it was one of the hardest experiences to juggle both the joy surrounding his birth and the sorrow surrounding her death.
I think one of the hardest parts of losing her for me was watching my father lose her. He just couldn’t be in the house with all the pictures and the smells.
In the middle of the night out of a panicked feeling without her, he started building bluebird houses in her memory needing one last connection to her.
The bluebird was her favorite bird and he had built her several to place in their yard to enjoy as a hobby.
I had continued asking my father how I could help after her funeral and he finally asked me to help get rid of the birdhouses he had made so he could continue building more. Using his hands was helping him cope with the loss.
I made a listing for the birdhouses on Facebook marketplace and it quickly went viral overnight. I shared a bit about my family and the loss of my mother as the reason behind the creation of the birdhouses and people lined up down the street to get into my neighborhood with Kleenex in their hands and tears on their cheeks resonating with our family’s loss and wanting to share their own stories and purchase birdhouses in memory of someone they had lost.
It was such a beautiful thing to experience. There was so much hope and power in the community we encountered. We started hosting workshops for families to build their own houses and workshops for people to paint and personalize their own houses in loving memory of their loved ones who had passed.
We were featured in people magazine and on the today show, Martha Stewart did an article on us and it all unearthed such a craving for community in grief.
My mother was the epitome of love for our family, and being able to continue feeling her love through this project was such an incredible blessing.
I had been using writing as an outlet for my own grief as we continued to connect with people through our birdhouses. The connections we made had a huge impact on my heart and what I continued hearing from people was how hard it was to address your own grief while being responsible for the young hearts in your family as well. Seeing the way my own children were also struggling with their grief lead me to search for resources not only for us, but for the families we were connecting with as well. The books I found contained euphemisms and inauthentic verbiage surrounding loss so I set out to create the message I wish we had had. Sharing a few stanzas of the pages I had written with the community we built lead to a go fund me which raised enough to publish the book and put it out into the world instead of spiral bounding it for my own children.
Rise Up, Little Bluebirds was created out of the collective grief my family experienced after my mother died and the huge impact and power of community we experienced through our grief. It became so important for me to create a message of hope through grief that normalized conversations surrounding loss and the big emotions that come with it all while highlighting that love is the unending connection the binds us all. Love is what we get to hold onto in the end.
I continue this work with book readings and speaking engagements sharing our family’s grief story and it remains such an enormous privilege to be able to put a little comfort into a space that is just so difficult to maneuver. It’s such a full circle thing now to be that resource for others that we so desperately needed in those tender early days.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I have a background in early childhood and have discovered a huge passion for normalizing conversations surrounding loss.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://Riseuplittlebluebirds.com
• Instagram: Riseuplittlebluebirds
• Facebook: Rise up, Little Bluebirds

Image Credits

Myself