A Child’s Death Changes Everything

A child’s death not only changes a parent forever, it also permanently alters a couple’s marriage. As individuals you must each deal with the confusion and pain that you are experiencing. As a couple you must face these changes and not allow it to separate you.

In a sense, you each have become something of a stranger to yourself and each other. And in the process, your marriage cannot be what it was before. It is the marriage of two people who have shared a very heavy loss. You are two people who have seen each other grieving, of two people who have gone through the relationship struggles couples experience when a child dies.

Beginners after a Child’s Death

You become new people, with no sense of whether you can or should return to being your old selves. You are likely to be beginners at dealing with the kind of grief parents feel, and beginners at coming to terms, as a couple, with whatever is going on in your life as individuals and as a couple. For quite a while, grief is likely to sap you and your partner of energy to solve problems. You will find it difficult to talk about things, to think things through well, and to come to terms with what has happened. For weeks, months, or even years, you may feel that you are in some kind of holding pattern, just trying to do the bare minimum to get along.

You Become Different People

Also, your child’s death makes you different from most people you know. Although several million American couples have lost a child, you may not know anyone whose experiences can be a resource to you. In fact, your friends, relatives, neighbors, coworkers, and the people in your religious congregation, may not be able or willing to help beyond the first outpouring of sympathy. Most will never have had a similar experience and most, even if they care for you deeply, will not be very comfortable with you.

Added to all this, grieving can make your couple relationship difficult. Being down so much, being needy and looking at everything in new ways after a child dies, it is easy for you and your spouse to see many negatives in each other. You may see many negatives in each other and in your marriage that may have been ignored or were not present in the past. So in addition to dealing with the loss of a child, you may have to deal with how to change your marital relationship, or even with the possible loss of your marriage.

Work Together in Grief

Dealing wisely with your relationship will help head off or minimize difficulties. If you can work together on your relationship, you may have success at backing away from bickering, blaming, and hurt feelings. You may have success dealing with communication difficulties, disappointments, and other issues that can undermine your relationship. And you may be able to offer support, help, and understanding for each other.

Parenting together is a shared journey, and dealing with a child’s death is as well. In bereavement, the couple journey will be hard. But it does not have to end in disaster.

Most Couples Worry

After a child’s death, most couples worry that it will be very hard to stay together. Even if they do, they often worry about whether they will be able to have a good marital relationship.

If either of you is worried about your marital future, it may help to say to each other that you have those worries. Then resolve to stay together. Whether you talk about it immediately or later, it can be an important step toward a strong and lasting relationship. Many grieving parents remember clearly the talk they had with their partner in which they said something like, “It’s going to be hard for us, but I am committed to staying with you.”

Erica: One thing we talked about the morning we found David dead was we knew that people had problems with marriages after a child died. We made a decision that we were going to continue to be married and that we were going to have to work at it for the other two children. I didn’t want David to be ashamed of us. We had to do that for his memory too. I didn’t want him to be the cause of our marriage breaking up.

Elaine: I can remember laying there that night and thinking that if I could just go to sleep and sleep for a year I know things would be better then. And I can remember that night too, him and I laying there and just making a vow to each other that it would not tear us apart, because so many people, their family cannot survive. We held on tight and just decided that we can’t, we just can’t let this destroy us.

History Together

I think bereaved couples have the same reasons most couples have for staying together—their history together, the emotional investments their relationship represents, the ways they depend on each other, and feelings of affection. But I also believe many bereaved parents are motivated by an additional factor when they make the commitment to stay together. Their commitment is rooted in a sense that no one else knew the child as well or could understand as much what was lost when the child died.

Jane: People seemed to be understanding, but nobody knew Adam but [my husband] Rob. And my feeling was that nobody was gonna be able to understand the depth of our loss except this other person who had lived with him. Not that I was ever thinking of leaving or becoming friendly with anyone else, but I kept thinking, “There’s no one in this world that understands what we’ve been through except each other.” And I found that as a kind of binding thing, a commonality, that more than ever I felt we had something in common. Not just kids and a house and a marriage, but the fact that we really understand what we were missing.

Determination to Stay Together

With your marriage seeming to be in danger and with the two of you determined to stay together, there will come times when you may want to make resolutions together about ways to keep your relationship strong. One important thing many couples do is resolve to accept their differences and to accept that they cannot be there for one another all the time.

Brett: After our son died, we made a vow that we’d stick together and we would work together. Through the grief group we found out that we grieve differently. And we did. Then we realized that we couldn’t help each other at times. And people kept saying, “You have to be there for your wife or your kids.”

Joan: Sometimes it’s just better to be left alone. Let each other grieve how we need to.

You’ll Grieve Differently

You will find that you and your spouse will not grieve the same way. You differ in biology, personality, upbringing, current responsibilities, the relationship you had with the child, and life experiences. Even if those things didn’t guarantee that you and your partner will mourn in your own way, women and men differ in numerous ways that will show up in how you deal with your child’s death.

In some couples, one partner believes how and when the other grieves is wrong, or one partner’s grief make the other feel uncomfortable. If over a long period, you let such differences upset you or if your differences lead to conflict, they can be a wedge that pushes the two of you far apart.

Spouses have different paces into and through various parts of grieving. One partner might have stronger feelings or a certain feeling soon after the loss, while the other might feel those things later. To some parents, there seems to be a route to travel, and they talk about being farther or less far along than their partner.

Grace for Different Paces of Grieving

There sometimes is a sense that being farther along is better, perhaps even moral. But I don’t think one pace is better than the other. Feelings of superiority or inferiority about the pace of grieving or the belief one partner’s pace is better than the other’s will make trouble you don’t need. There is no scientific basis for saying one pace in grieving is better than another.

One of you might move quickly into active talking, reading, thinking, and feeling to deal with the death, while the other might not. Again, accepting the difference is desirable.

One of you may try to be “strong” while the other is grieving intensely. “Strong” might mean doing necessary things around the house instead of focusing on grief or feeling that there was no point in doing things. “Strong” might mean not being swamped emotionally, or it might mean acting like things will be better. Lots of men feel the need to be strong for their partner, holding off their grief in order to be strong and supportive.

Outward Emotions Can Be Different

.Differences in outward emotion lead to resentment in some couples. When one spouse feels down and the other seems up, each may resent the other. One might, for example, think, “How can you dare to be so upbeat when our child is dead?” The other might think, “When you are down like this you drag me down,” or “Get over it.” They may also express, “I am worried about you.” But such differences are to be expected and I think, accepted.

There can also be misunderstanding on both sides. The partner who controls emotions less can resent the other for seeming not to care about the child or acting superior. The partner who controls emotions more may not understand how much the one who is more emotional must be that way. Neither may grasp what they see in the other is normal and right.

Different Wants

In some couples there seems to be turn-taking in emotional control. When one partner is deep in grief, the other controls his or her emotions enough to do the basics. Perhaps that spouse says things that are meant to be soothing and supportive.

The one who wants more conversation might decide to wait it out, but might still feel angry that the partner will not talk. Also, just as the spouse who wants to talk finds the other’s silence frustrating and infuriating, the spouse who wants to talk less can be irritated by the other’s pressure to talk.

The main point is that you should expect and tolerate differences between you and your partner. Doing so is not likely to make the grieving process any easier. However, it should help you and your spouse to maintain a stronger couple relationship as you deal with the death of your child.

No One Way to Grieve

Realize that there is no single path that couples who do well together follow. There is no formula, no sure series of steps that will guarantee a good outcome. Each couple starts at a different place, has different problems to deal with, and has different resources available. They each bring with them different histories (including different past experiences with death and other losses). They also have different values, and different personalities to add to the situation. So each journey is unique.

Some couples have no serious problems after their child’s death. But other couples, even years later, struggle to build a comfortable, connecting relationship.

As bereaved parents, you travel with luggage from your past. Included in that luggage are your previous experiences, as individuals and as a couple, with death and grief. Such experiences can be a source of problems. Your child’s death could open up new and difficult matters concerning a previous death.

Deaths Dealt With in the Past

If you or your spouse have never dealt with a major death before, some things are likely to be harder. A first death can produce painful struggles not only with the death but with your own morality, God’s will, how and when to control emotions. You whither to ask for help on what a funeral involves, how to deal with the legal and insurance matters, and many other issues. All this can make the pain and confusion of bereavement more challenging.

A child’s death can be so uniquely painful that there are real limits to how much experience can help. You may have dealt with the death of others who were very important in your life. But you may never have dealt with feelings as deep, confusing, or as profound as you have experienced with your child’s death.

Past History Influences Grieving

A couple’s history together also can make them vulnerable to problems following the death of their child. Perhaps you have lived together for years with intense anger at one another, and chronically hurt feelings. You may have communication problems that make your relationship together very hard, and cause frequent doubts about your partnership. If this is true, you lack a solid foundation on which to work together after your child dies. I’m not talking about the ordinary squabbles, anger, and frustrations of married life, but about grinding day-after-day difficulties.

For some couples with a long history of relationship difficulties, the child’s death intensifies the problems. If they squabbled before, they argue more often and more bitterly afterward. If there was already considerable anger in the marriage, the child’s death intensifies those feelings.

Bill: She’s always felt some anger at me, but more so as a result of this. She said I just didn’t grieve enough or in the sense that she felt was appropriate. When we would get into discussions, there were hostilities that would emerge that we couldn’t discuss to resolve it. [He and his wife were divorcing.]

Undermining Difficulties

Sometimes a child’s death undermines a couple’s patterns of dealing with difficulty. This is particularly true if the child was crucial in keeping the relationship going.

Al: The biggest reason I think people part after a death is that you have the problem finding a reason to go on, to keep going. If you’ve got the kid, you’ve got something in common. And if he ain’t there any longer, you’ve lost that, the bond between the two of you, tying you together.

If you both who relied on the child to link you, it certainly is possible to forge or discover new links. It is also possible to find new ways to continue to have the child be a major link. You also should understand that you need to be patient with the unpredictable process of coming up with stronger ties.

Some Struggle in Their Relationship, Some Don’t

For some couples, serious difficulties never arise in dealing with a child’s death. But for others, there are real struggles. But you should know that many marriages survive those difficulties. This includes even those that had problems before a child’s death. People learn and change. You can find resources that transform you and your marital relationship. Together you can make your marriage work.

This article was edited from the book Help Your Marriage Survive the Death of a Child, written by Paul Rosenblatt. (Unfortunately it is no longer being published.) It was based on intensive interviews of 29 couples who experienced the death of a child. This book offers perspectives and advice on common marital problems experienced by bereaved parents.

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