“Love You Forever,” the popular children’s book, has a somber story behind it, according to the book’s author.
Penned by Robert Munsch and illustrated by Sheila McGraw in 1986, the book was actually an ode to Munsch and his wife’s stillborn baby---their second.
He came up a song before publishing the book that included the lyrics:
I'll love you forever,
I'll like you for always,
As long as I’m living
my baby you'll be.
Later, Munsch got another gut-punch after his second stillborn child. He was told by a doctor the couple would never be able to conceive, reported The Huffington Post.
The couple went on to adopt three children, but he used the song to grieve the two that were stillborn. He explained to the website that he never wrote it down or sung it aloud---choosing to sing it to himself silently.
“I made that up after my wife and I had two babies born dead. The song was my song to my dead babies,” Munsch wrote on his website.
Before he wrote anything down, Munsch would perform his material in front of crowds. One day, a song was in the back of his head while he was performing and made up a story to accompany the song, “Love You Forever,” on the spot.
He then brought it to a publisher, but they rejected it. The distributer published the story instead and it went on to sell 15 million copies. “He said when he read it, he just felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up,” Munsch told HuffPost.
Munsch, 70, has now written 50 children’s books, with his three adopted kids appearing in five.
