Grief & Marriage: Part 1

When my husband and I received our diagnosis, our baby’s poor prognosis, I begged him,

“Tell me what you want to do. Not what you think I want to hear, but what you think.”

My husband is a good man who loves to make me happy. He could easily fall into wife-pleasing if I didn’t phrase it this way. But he heard me. He sat for a moment, and then he gave me the gift of his truth:

“Kate, you don’t have to do this, but I think we should ask about the abortion.”

The word “abortion” had been bouncing around in my head desperately trying to get out, but I just coulnd’t say it. Finally, here it was, right there in the air, and I didn’t have to say it first. Relief is an understatement. The light I felt flooding me, the fresh air and vast open space, it was grace.

This is what togetherness looks like in decision making — and it is a gift. Not all couples are THIS together. Not all couples agree on the choice in the first place. But we were lucky: we were together almost every step of our crisis.

I fully expected that we’d grieve together, too.

We did not.

Nobody does.

Grief is inherently lonesome. Discovering this for yourself is one of the hardest things about losing a baby.

“You’re going to grieve differently.”

This is the message from a dear family friend whose daughter should be my age but was stillborn instead. I’ve known her and her husband and the children who came after my whole life. When we lost Laurel, she came to my house, sat me down, and this is what she told me.

“You’re going to be in different places at different times. It doesn’t match up.”

She knows as well as I now do that there are no examples to learn from. Marital grief strife happens in the shadows. I can’t point to even one example of bereaved parents grieving in a marriage in a book or a movie that feels realistic. We’re on our own.

Everyone on the outside (and everyone who is in the process of initiation) just assumes: you’re in it together. If you’re lucky, you made choices in the crisis together. You held each other through the shit storm. You’re both parents, missing your baby. Surely you will be there for each other when nobody else understands.

No.

My husband and I couldn’t begin to understand each other in grief because grief is inherently lonesome.

I was the low-functioning griever. The basket-case. It was everything I could do just to drag myself out of bed. Having a living child to care for was a blessing (I had to get out of bed for her) and a burden (I wasn’t the mom I wanted to be to her when grieving and the guilt was immense). I cried all the time. I went through the motions, barely. I was a shell of myself, or numb, like nothing at all. The pain was oppressive. It brought me to my knees, literally, right on the kitchen floor, in front of my alarmed 2 year old, over and over again. Every day felt like swimming against the tide of grief in an unrelenting storm. I lived for the second sleep found me even as I dreaded the nightmares that waited on the other side of consciousness. My grief was brutal.

My husband was the high-functioning griever. He took his week of medical emergency and a week of bereavement leave and then went straight back to work. He’s quiet anyway. On the outside, very little looked different. He didn’t want to talk about what happened, couldn’t tolerate listening about it, so I had no insight into his thought process or grief experience.

It hurts like hell to not understand each other here.

I’d look at my husband and think (and, to my shame, occasionally even say):

Don’t you even care?

Do you have ANY IDEA what I’ve been through?

Didn’t she mean anything to you?

How can you just keep living like nothing happened?

What is wrong with you?

And he’d look at me and think (or sometimes even say):

Who are you and what have you done with my wife?

Is this just the way you’re — we’re — going to be forever now?

It’s time to move on.

What’s wrong with you?

I’d try and try to get from my husband what I needed: love, support, listening. But every time I brought up hard conversations, he’d clam up, which made me irate, which would send us into some variation of fighting and stonewalling, and I just felt even less supported. Even more alone. And even more afraid! What if my marriage broke under this pressure. I’d lose my husband, my family, EVERYTHING.

I couldn’t have convinced my husband to come to support group with me for anything. There was no budging him. But one woman at my HOPE group did manage to drag her reluctant husband to group, and when it came his time to defend himself against “do you even care?” he said,

“My family can grieve in a tent or in a house.”

And there it is, what I needed to hear from my husband but he could not say: I don’t want my family to grieve in a tent. I want you to grieve comfortable and taken care of in our own home. I want to make the mortgage payments so that you can grieve in comfort. That’s why I go to work.

It hadn’t even occurred to me that my high functioning husband was loving me by providing.

At the best of times, we often don’t understand each other across a marriage. We are two different people, living two different realities. But in grief, that distance can feel immense because all the nerves are raw and the stakes feel so, so high. My first lesson in marriage in grief is this:

Trust your partner’s process even as you do not get to see under the hood of it.

The more I leaned into the trust (blind faith!) that my husband was grieving exactly right for him and showing his love in whatever way he could, the easier it got to trust in MY OWN process. For “what’s wrong with you?” is so often just a thinly veiled “what’s wrong with ME!?” Ok, so he’s the stoic and I’m the basket-case and we’re exactly where we need to be.

When he’d look at me with terror “who are you and what have you done with my wife?” It didn’t get at me anymore. He just didn’t understand that my grief is perfect for me, and that’s ok, because he’s on his own grief planet.

Could I access this zen all of the time? Of course not. But even once or twice a month is better than never. Just to feel the trust — really feel it — once opens up enough space that the marriage isn’t such a pressure cooker anymore. What if you let your partner’s grief be perfect without having to understand it at all? Could you also let your own grief be perfect even as it looks very different?

Try it.

When I went to school to be a love, sex, and relationship coach, it was with my grieving moms and dads in mind. Grief is massively undersupported in the world, but so, too, is marriage — and the overlap of the two? Forget-about-it. It doesn’t exist.

I just received my certificate to practice VITA coaching with couples the other day. It is a very intense training and took a lot of work to finish this qualification. The thing I love most about it is that it is so TRUE to what I learned for myself when navigating relationship friction in grief. Every lesson I learned the hard way is in this body of work.

If you’re in it, I see you. To feel at odds in your marriage after losing your baby together is absolutely brutal. I’ll keep rolling out the lessons I learned the hard way via this blog. Keep what fits and leave the rest.

And if you’d like to be better supported than I was:

6 months of couples coaching are now available.

And if your partner is like my partner, rather than drag him kicking and screaming, know that solo work on one side of a relationship can have massive transformative impact on the entire relationship:

1 on 1 coaching spots are available. You know if you’ve looked for it how rare it is to be supported by someone who is skilled, trained and initiated. I’m here if you need me.