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By Danny H. Levin — founder, and part of Austin's family
One of you cries. One of you cleans the garage.
One of you wants to say the name forty times a day and one of you goes quiet when it comes up. One of you has been back at work for a month and the other cannot understand how. One of you keeps the door shut and one of you cannot walk past it without going in.
And each of you has privately started to wonder whether the other one loved them as much.
That is the sentence nobody says out loud, so it is going first.
The number you have been told, and why it is not in this piece
Somebody has probably told you that most marriages end after a child dies. Eighty percent, or ninety, depending on who was talking.
We could not find a source for that figure. Not a weak one — none. It is repeated everywhere and attributed nowhere.
And here is the part that matters more, because it is where most articles like this one go wrong: the reassuring correction is not sourced either. The kinder numbers that get offered in reply — twelve percent, sixteen percent — are published without a study, an author or a year attached. We do not get to use an unsourced number because we like what it says.
So here is what the research we could actually stand up does say, and it is not the comforting version.
In 2008, in the Journal of Family Psychology, Catherine Rogers and colleagues compared 428 bereaved parents with 428 parents who had not lost a child, an average of eighteen years after the death. The bereaved parents “were more likely to have experienced a depressive episode and marital disruption” than the comparison group.
More likely. Not doomed, not eighty percent — but more likely, measurably, eighteen years on.
We are telling you that rather than the nice number because you will find out either way, and being handed a reassurance that turns out to be invented is worse than being told the truth at the start.
The same study found one more thing, and it is the only hopeful sentence in this section that we can actually source: recovery from grief was associated with having a sense of life purpose, and it was unrelated to the cause of death or to how much time had passed. Not time. Purpose.
The thing you are both probably doing, which is making it worse
You are each holding your grief in so as not to load it onto the other one, and that is making it worse for both of you. It is the most useful finding we have read about couples after a child dies.
In 2013, in Psychological Science, Margaret Stroebe and colleagues studied 219 couples whose child had died. They looked at something they called partner-oriented self-regulation — the ordinary, loving, entirely well-intentioned act of holding your grief in so as not to load it onto the person next to you. Not crying in front of them. Changing the subject. Being fine at breakfast.
They found that holding it back “was not only associated with an increase in the person's own grief but also with an increase in the partner's grief.”
Read that twice. Protecting them made it worse for them.
Stroebe's own summary of it: “While parents seek to protect their partners through POSR, this effort has the opposite effect, and it is associated with worse adjustment over time.”
The mechanism is not mysterious once you see it. You go quiet to spare them. They see composure. They conclude, privately, that it has not hit you the way it hit them — that maybe you are already further along, or that maybe you did not feel it as much. And then they start hiding theirs, so as not to embarrass you with it.
Two people alone in the same house, each being strong at the other one.
What to do with that, and this is a description and not an instruction
Nothing here is a route anybody has to take.
Stop translating the behavior. The garage is not indifference. The crying is not collapse. The going back to work is not moving on. The silence when you say the name is often the person who cannot say it without going under, which looks identical from the outside to the person who does not want to hear it.
You can ask, rather than conclude. “When I say his name and you go quiet — what is that?” is a question. “You never want to talk about him” is a verdict, and a verdict ends the conversation before it starts.
You do not have to do it at the same time. Grieving in convoy is not a requirement and most couples cannot manage it. What we have found to help is far smaller than togetherness: it is each of you knowing where the other one has gone, and that they are coming back.
Some people find it easier with a third person in the room — a counselor, a group, a Compassionate Friends chapter where every couple in the circle has had this exact argument. That is not a failure of the marriage. It is sometimes the only place where saying the true thing does not cost the other person anything.
And if one of you is much worse than the other one
Sometimes it is not a difference in style. Sometimes one person is genuinely not coping, and the other one has been carrying it alone and calling it a rough patch for months. This is the part we will not soften, because it is the part that gets skipped.
If that is your house, the difference is worth naming out loud rather than managing quietly. And if you are frightened for them — if they have said they do not want to be here, or you have found yourself checking on them — that is not a marriage problem and it is not yours to solve on your own.
988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline — call or text 988.
Crisis Text Line — text HOME to 741741.
Both are free, 24/7, and either of you can use them. So can you, on your own behalf, about the person you are worried about.
Where this actually lands
Nobody in this is doing it wrong. There is no correct way to lose a child, no schedule, no version that means you loved them properly.
The only thing worth protecting is the assumption. The assumption that the quiet one is quiet from love, that the busy one is busy from love, and that neither of you has been handed a better set of instructions than the other.
You are not competing. You are the only two people on earth who lost this particular child.
Save this for the day you need it.
Sources: Rogers CH, Floyd FJ, Seltzer MM, Greenberg J, Hong J, “Long-term effects of the death of a child on parents' adjustment in midlife,” Journal of Family Psychology, vol. 22, no. 2, 2008, pp. 203–211. DOI 10.1037/0893-3200.22.2.203. · Stroebe M, Finkenauer C, Wijngaards-de Meij L, Schut H, van den Bout J, Stroebe W, “Partner-Oriented Self-Regulation Among Bereaved Parents: The Costs of Holding In Grief for the Partner's Sake,” Psychological Science, 2013. DOI 10.1177/0956797612457383.
