The Little Girl Who Became a Unicorn: A Children’s Book About Grief, Love, and the Lives That Change Us

Her name was Kennedy.

She was born in 2019, one week after her mother’s closest friend welcomed her own son into the world. She had heterotaxy syndrome, a rare congenital condition that affects how the body’s internal organs develop. She was brave in ways most of us will never have to be.

She died at four months old.

And for everyone who loved her, unicorns became the word for what she was.

Not because she was imaginary. Because she was rare. Because she was magical in the truest sense of that word, the kind that has nothing to do with fairy tales and everything to do with what one small life can leave behind in the people fortunate enough to have known it.

If You’re Lucky Enough to Know a Unicorn began as a poem. It took six years to become a book. And the physical copies arrived on the anniversary of Kennedy’s passing.

Some things find their timing on their own.

A Poem That Could Not Be Forced

Haleigh Bresnan, M.Ed., was newly postpartum when she began writing.

She and her friend Lauren had become mothers within a week of each other in 2019. Bresnan welcomed her son Wesson. Lauren welcomed Kennedy. And then, in the way that some of the hardest things in life arrive, everything changed.

Bresnan had never personally known anyone who had experienced infant loss. She found herself trying to hold two things at once: the joy of her own new baby and the heartbreak of watching someone she loved lose hers.

Writing became somewhere for that to go.

“I chipped away at this poem little by little for years,” she shared with Modern Parenthood Journal. When she tried to force the words, they did not come. When she was ready for them, they did.

That patience shows in every page.

Two Cousins, Two Griefs, One Book

The partnership behind this book is its own story.

Bresnan and her cousin Rebecca Brigner, Ed.S., NCSP, grew up in Eastern Connecticut more like sisters than cousins. Today Bresnan teaches elementary school and Brigner works as a school psychologist. Their professional lives have given both women years of experience supporting children through hard things.

But this project did not come from professional training alone.

As the book was being created, Brigner received devastating news at her 20-week anatomy scan. Her third child, a son named Bowen, had died in utero.

A book born from one family’s grief was now being carried forward by another mother deep inside her own.

That history cannot be manufactured. It gives the book a weight and a tenderness that readers will feel without being told why. These are not two women writing theoretically about loss. They are two mothers, two educators, two cousins who have lived inside the conversations this book is trying to help other families start.

If You Are Reading This Because You Need It

Not every parent comes to a book like this out of curiosity.

Some of you are here because you are already in it. Because someone you love is sick, or gone, or somewhere in between. Because a child in your life is asking questions you do not have answers to. Because you are trying to find a way to talk about something that does not yet have words in your home.

If that is you, we want you to know that Modern Parenthood Journal sees you.

Grief inside a family does not follow a schedule or a script. It surfaces at bathtime and in the car and in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday when something small suddenly brings everything back. Children carry it in ways that do not always look like sadness. Parents carry it in ways they do not always have space to name.

You do not have to have this figured out to sit down with your child and open a book together.

That is exactly what this book was made for.

What the Unicorn Makes Possible

Talking to children about death is one of the places where even the most thoughtful parent can feel completely lost.

How much do we explain? What can they actually understand? Are we making things worse by bringing it up? Should we wait until they ask?

What a book can do that a parent sometimes cannot is open a door without requiring anyone to have every word ready first.

If You’re Lucky Enough to Know a Unicorn does not explain death clinically or center the story on medical realities. It uses the unicorn metaphor to explore what remains after loss: love, memory, courage, connection, and the quiet lasting impact one person can leave on the world around them.

Bresnan hopes the story gives children language for something genuinely complicated. That loving someone can be both beautiful and frightening when you know you might lose them. That sadness does not erase joy. That joy does not mean you have forgotten.

Both can be true at the same time. Children need to know that.

For Families, Classrooms, and Anyone Who Has Loved Someone Rare

Although Kennedy’s story inspired this book, Bresnan and Brigner were intentional about writing something that reaches beyond one diagnosis.

Families navigating serious illness, pregnancy loss, infant loss, or the death of someone important may recognize their own experience within these pages. The book has found a natural place in classrooms, school counseling offices, libraries, hospital settings, and hospice programs, anywhere that children need a gentle starting point for conversations adults are not always sure how to begin.

Bresnan and Brigner also offer families something beautifully simple to try together. They call it a unicorn moment.

Invite your child to think of someone who is special to them. Draw that person. Tell a favorite story about them. Name something that made them unlike anyone else.

There does not have to be a loss attached to the activity. The point is simply to practice noticing what people leave with us: what they taught us, how they made us laugh, how we felt when we were near them.

For a grieving child, that same practice becomes a way to remember without having to explain everything they feel.

Meet the Author and Illustrator

Haleigh Bresnan, M.Ed. is an educator, mother, and author from Eastern Connecticut. She teaches elementary school in the same district her children attend and coaches high school cheerleading. If You’re Lucky Enough to Know a Unicorn is her first children’s book.

Rebecca Brigner, Ed.S., NCSP is the book’s illustrator and a school psychologist. She brought her artistic background and her professional experience supporting children to a project that is deeply woven into her own life and family.

Together they created something rooted in friendship, motherhood, education, and the belief that children’s literature can give families a place to begin the conversations that are otherwise hardest to start.

Book Details

Title: If You’re Lucky Enough to Know a Unicorn
Author: Haleigh Bresnan, M.Ed.
Illustrator: Rebecca Brigner, Ed.S., NCSP
Publisher: Palmetto Publishing
Publication Date: February 17, 2026
Recommended Ages: 3–8, with broader reach for families, educators, counselors, and anyone supporting a child through grief or serious illness
Available in: Hardcover and Paperback

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