Growing up, I knew of a few couples who had lost children. No one particularly close to me, but rather friends of friends that I heard about through the grapevine. Even as a child, I heard discussions about the shockingly high divorce rate of bereaved parents. I’m not sure exactly what the origin of it was, but somewhere along the way this became an assumption of mine. Marriages simply do not survive the heartbreak of losing a child.
Flash forward to June of 2020. I sat in a doctor’s office hearing the worst news of my life. I was 22 weeks pregnant with my first precious baby. A baby I was very much looking forward to raising with the love of my life. We had just had the pleasure of watching her on the ultrasound, almost forgetting why we were there. Almost forgetting that the genetic screening had come back positive for Trisomy 13.
The doctor sat down and informed us that our baby’s condition was “incompatible with life” and offered the option to terminate the pregnancy. I was completely shocked. The term incompatible with life offered us very little hope of any life for our child at all. I was left with two options: continue the pregnancy or end it. But either way, we were going to lose our baby.
So many thoughts raced through my head in the months that followed. One of which being: will my marriage survive this? In our nearly 10 years together and 4 years of marriage at that time, we had already been faced with some hurdles to overcome. I now regard these challenges as ways that God was preparing us for our time with Eden. Going into 2020, our marriage was in such a strong place when we decided to grow our family. This is an example of God’s graciousness to us with the timing of Eden’s life.
After Eden died, Baylor and I quickly discovered that we grieved very differently. Baylor was able to compartmentalize his grief and function almost like normal, whereas my grief seemed to seep into each and every part of my day. I did not have the option of simply switching it off. It demanded my constant attention, especially in the first few months. The day after Eden died, Baylor went to the funeral home and made arrangements while I sobbed in bed. He returned to work within a few weeks. I was operating purely in survival mode at the time, barely even capable of taking care of my own basic needs, let alone recognizing someone else’s needs. Baylor was there to remind me to eat when I would sometimes forget to. He rescued me from social situations when he recognized that they were too much for me. I felt completely devoid of purpose as a mother with empty arms, whereas Baylor experienced a surge of purpose in supporting his grieving wife.
Even in his grief, Baylor seemed to have access to hope and comfort that I wasn’t feeling. He felt great comfort in the promise of seeing Eden again one day in Heaven, whereas this concept felt too abstract to me to offer any true comfort from the crushing reality of life without my child. My grief feels like a complex web of seemingly conflicting emotions all occurring at once. It came in waves that unexpectedly knocked me off my feet. Baylor’s grief behaved in a more linear and contained fashion.
It’s not that Baylor doesn’t grieve. He grieves quietly, in a less obvious way than I do. Sometimes I think I may be the only one that sees his grief. It’s the way he teared up seeing a dad with his daughter watching a fireworks show. It’s the way he gets quiet during father daughter dances at weddings. It’s the way his voice cracks when he reads me scriptures that remind him of how special our daughter is. It’s the way he cries with me when I’m having an especially grief-filled day and need to watch Eden’s memorial video. Even despite the differences in the ways that we grieve, I know neither of us grieves more than the other. We both love our little girl so much, and we talk about her every single day.
Baylor and I try to find ways to let the other person in how we are experiencing our grief. One way that we do this is to try to speak the other person’s grief language. If there is a moment in Baylor’s day where he thinks of Eden and feels sad or cries, instead of internalizing it, he makes a note to himself to tell me about it later. This could be as simple as hearing a song or reading scripture that made him think of Eden. Likewise, if there is a moment in my day where I am able to feel hopeful and joyful about the promise of spending eternity with Eden, I will share that with Baylor. This is our way of bringing one another into our individual grief experiences and using them to drive connection instead of separation.
I’m going to jump back to those divorce statistics I alluded to earlier. Recently, there was a popular Instagram post circulating claiming a 90% divorce rate for bereaved parents. Again, I was reminded of this concept of the allegedly terrible outcomes for marriage after child loss. However, when I dug into the research on this, it revealed very clearly that the 90% divorce rate is a myth that has been perpetuated for decades. This rumored statistic seems to date back to a 1977 book by Harriet Schiff called “The Bereaved Parent”, in which she reports that as many as 90% of bereaved couples suffer “serious marital difficulty” after the death of a child. However, recent publications and data does not indicate an increased risk for divorce for couples who have experienced the death of a child. This is not to say that it cannot strain a marriage, but it does leave room for hope.
My marriage is not perfect, and never will be, because it is composed of two imperfect people. But while imperfect, marriage has been a beautiful illustration for me of the love that Jesus has for the Church. Baylor has seen me at my lowest point and loved me even in my brokenness. He saw the not-so-pretty emotions that can come out sometimes with child loss, like anger, resentment, and jealousy and loved me through them. It reminds me of Romans 5:8, which states that “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (ESV, emphasis added). I’m thankful that God doesn’t wait for us to fix ourselves up, he loves us even while we’re messing things up. My marriage has given me such a deeper understanding of that kind of love. Baylor teaches me every day about grace, and points me towards Jesus in the times when I really want to run away.
My marriage has been a profound gift to me in my suffering. This time of growing together through grief has shown me that even if you belong to this unfortunate club of parents who have lost children, it doesn’t necessarily mean the end of your marriage as you know it. Sometimes it means an even deeper understanding of why marriage exists.
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