“He
wondered why I wasn’t feeling better; I wondered why he wasn’t feeling worse.”
—Sylvia
Your baby’s
death may be the most serious, destabilizing crisis you and your spouse have
ever faced. You’ve been tested, your relationship drawn closer, or dismantled.
How you communicated with one another prior to the event may have a lot to do
with how you endure this trauma. While your friends and family will most likely
move on—quickly—and expect you to do likewise, the two of you may feel
continuously lost, broken and upended, unable to heal and unable to converse
with one another about your baby and your stalled healing. It may feel as
though you’re floundering solo, individually grieving on your own, solitary
islands, unable to connect, encourage or sympathize. Isolating yourselves from
one another becomes the norm.
Often, immediately
following the event, you’re drawn closer and grieve productively together. One
may be supportive while the other spirals out of control. Then the roles can
switch: when one’s up, the other’s down. When a mother withdraws from life and
activities, her husband may gently encourage her, or even insist, that she get
out, go see a movie, meet with a friend for tea, resume a dance class, or start
something new she’s always wanted to do. Notice I said gently encourage or insist,
not angrily demand that she engage in
activities. It’s tempting to make impatient, high-handed, I-know-what’s-right-for-you-even-if-you-don’t,
patronizing demands when you’re ready
to move on, have cried yourself dry and don’t see any point in languishing in
grief any longer. You want to move,
and you expect everyone
else—including your spouse—to just get over it and get on with it. (Remember
that this event isn’t just all about you.)
But one woman, Cecelia, expressed gratefulness when her husband dragged her to
a choir rehearsal, even though she begged him not to make her go in. He
encouraged her, and she found the two-year involvement therapeutic.
Long after the
friends have stopped dropping by to just sit and listen, or calling to see how
you’re doing, and the father has returned to work and daily routine, the mother
will likely be in continued mourning. She wonders why her husband isn’t
supportive; he wonders why she keeps dragging this out, making her life, and
his, miserable. If you don’t understand that incongruent grief is common, this will add a burden and toll to
your relationship and healing.
“Deep fears usually lie at the root
of this conflict. A bereaved father can
become convinced that something is
seriously wrong with his continually
grieving wife. She then feels
betrayed by the one person she had relied on
to understand her, comfort her, and
share in the loss.”1
Women, try to
put yourself in the father’s shoes; men, try to put yourselves in the mother’s shoes.
Ask yourself what they might be
feeling under these circumstances. Give them the
benefit of the doubt, no matter how mad, angry, tired, or confused you, or they, are. And a big
one: Ask God to reveal your partner’s heart to you and reveal to you how you
can better understand and help them. How you can really love them through their grief, like God loves us, unconditionally, through our
self-absorption, crankiness, stubbornness, pain, shortsightedness, ignorance, anger,
confusion, disillusionment and stupidity. Often love is not so much a feeling
as it is an action. Take that action!
Concentrate on nurturing one another.
Displaying Anger~
Some partners
can handle angry outbursts of the other person quite well, without taking the eruption
personally. Others cannot. They feel guilty, blamed, attacked, walloped, weak
and impotent. This is what happened in our case: Chris took my outbursts as
direct personal attacks, internalizing all of my spoken or silent communication, assuming I laid blame for Victoria’s death and my pain on him. Since he had
effectively shut down his communication about the loss, my actions and
words—from my hindsight perspective—were really cries for attention and
reaffirmation of his love for me. His avoidance led me to display my anger in
other ways, in other areas, and previously mundane issues became problematic. For
over a year, it didn’t go well for us. I didn’t ‘get’ him; he didn’t ‘get’ me,
and we groped around endlessly in emotional darkness.
Discussing the Loss~
Sometimes—actually,
often—men think women don’t want to talk about the loss because talking about
it will only keep the pain on the surface. So they avoid the subject.
Unfortunately, this avoidance tactic can backfire, because his wife may really need and want to talk about the baby, about all of the new mothers and
babies she’s encountering, about the careless comments people make to her. This
is how Hilary described how her need to talk and her husband’s need to remain
silent about the death of their twins affected them:
“In the beginning we talked about
the babies, the grief, and when to try
to get pregnant again. But then
Bennett said, ‘I want to talk about the loss
but not all the time.’ I said, ‘If I
can’t talk to you, who can I talk to?’ We
both understood each other but
couldn’t help each other.”2
If your partner
cannot, or won’t talk about it, find someone or a support group willing to
listen, and, (may I be blunt), stop resenting the other person for not grieving
the way you are. (Outright insensitivity or negligent, unloving, abusive
behavior is another topic.) Dwelling on their shortcomings will only cause
resentment to build; and resentment eventually leads to total lack of empathy,
anger, misunderstandings, feeling misunderstood, and emotional distancing, all
of which can result in the fracturing, or dissolution, of your marriage. You
are prone to becoming so entrenched and self-absorbed in your own pain and
“justified” feelings that you’re only able to view the other person’s attitude
and approach, and everything about them, as “wrong.”
If you do feel
you’re pulling away from one another, understand that the feeling of disunion
is most often due to fear and hurt, not lack of love for one another or love
for your baby.
While in the
state of Iowa this past week for my aunt’s memorial/family reunion, I read a
story in the local newspaper, The Courier,
about a couple, Heather and Drew Collins, who were recognizing the one year anniversary of their
eight-year old daughter’s abduction and murder. I found some of their thoughts
and words helpful for any parent who has lost a child:
“…When you are sitting idle, aren’t
keeping yourself busy, that’s when
the monsters come. You have too much
time to think,” Drew Collins said.
The article
pointed out that the couple also remains focused on nurturing their family
because of the toll such tragedies like theirs take on marriages. “The divorce
rate is 98 percent, they say,” [Heather] Collins said. She reported that their marriage
is still strong. “We also respect each other’s way of how we grieve,” she said.
“I understand he grieves differently, and I’m OK with that.”
Her wisdom is
solid: Respect. We grieve
differently. And we need to be OK with that.
_____________________________________
NEXT WEEK: Your grief and sexuality. What about
another baby?
_____________________________________
Thanks for
joining me.
Until next week!
Blessings,
Andrea
1 A Silent
Sorrow: Pregnancy Loss; Kohn and Moffitt (Dell Publishing, 1992), page 50
2 Ibid; page
52
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