Grieving with your Partner

At our house, our wedding vows are framed in our bedroom above our nightstands. On my side are the commitments that Jordan made to me that sunny August 2022 afternoon. On his are the promises I made to him.

In Jordan’s vows, he said that at every turn in our relationship, we’ve come out stronger, closer, more deeply in love and with stronger trust in each other. He promised to trust me when times are tough and celebrate with me when times are golden. In mine, I promised to support and uplift him, to respect our differences and celebrate what we share. I said that I would never take our relationship for granted so that we could be the best we could be for each other and how we show up in the world.

Less than four years into our marriage, those promises have already taken on a depth I could not have imagined or understood when we wrote them. The day Nathan died threatened to break us, and we held on tightly to each other as we held our son’s body and said goodbye. The vows beside our bed have become our guiding principles, like prayers or meditations. They’ve become reminders of how we need to keep reaching for each other instead of staying broken apart in our loss. Since Nathan’s death, we have been trying to put the pieces back together, together.

I reflect on the first few hours and days after Nathan died and I can’t put into words how we survived. I don’t know how we still somehow supported each other and held each other up even though we were individually shattered.

We were in shock and numb, yet our loss required intentional action from us. We did not want to lose each other inside our sorrow so we needed to find our way towards each other. It happened instinctively rather than feeling demanding, to give to each other when it felt like neither of us had anything left to give.

I think of that time in sounds.

The sobs that erupted from me without even consciously realizing. The sound of Jordan running up the stairs to meet me and hold me because he could hear my cries. The unending sniffling that we were both doing when the tears would come in throughout the day. There were muffled greetings downstairs as Jordan met our friends and family at the door, visitors there to comfort us and share in our sadness. In my pain from my C-section and my heartbreak, I waited at the top of the stairs, holding myself upright and together until our visitors reached me and I could fall into their arms.

Then there was the silence. The silence after people left. The silence when we woke up and remembered. The silence between us when there was nothing that we could say to each other.

In some ways, grieving together began before Nathan died. It felt like it already started in the NICU, having to trust each other.

Jordan said that he felt a shift in the NICU that afternoon when we witnessed Nathan coding, but I could not let myself believe that Nathan might die. I was desperately praying and begging that he would live. When the doctor took us aside and told us that there was nothing more that could be done, we each had our responses. Jordan said he didn’t want Nathan to suffer, and I took charge of making sure Nathan could be brought to us, that we could hold him privately and have the time we needed to say goodbye. We trusted each other to carry different parts of those last, precious moments with our boy.

We had done everything we could to care for Nathan through the start and end of his life. There was no way to prepare for the unimaginable situation we found ourselves in, and we had to then witness grief moving through each other and our marriage. 

I had to literally lean on Jordan during my recovery, not just emotionally. I was recovering from my C-section and moving slow throughout the house. If something fell on the floor, I needed him to pick it up. It was pure emotional and physical vulnerability. I was tending to my heart while navigating pain, medication, bleeding and a body that had just given birth.

When we tell people about Nathan’s birth, we joke about Jordan seeing my insides because he came into the room when the surgery had already started. He had seen me physically opened to bring our son into the world. Now, he had to hold me to keep me from coming undone after our son’s death. That experience was both graphic and tender.

Even though he was keeping me from hurting, I could see how much Jordan was hurting too. In my vows, I told him he was “the one my soul loves.” It made sense that I could feel his sadness inside my own. Alongside my grief for Nathan was the heartbreak of watching my husband in so much pain, a father without his son.

I watched as an overarching sadness descended on him. Seeing deep sorrow settle over a usually easygoing and carefree spirit activated fear in me. I started thinking about social norms and stigma around men’s mental health. I wanted to know that he had support, that we had support, and that grief would not isolate him inside himself.

I talked to my girlfriends about how they supported their husbands through grief, and it felt like I had some purpose to care for Jordan in those early days. I know that caring for me gave him purpose too. He managed my pain medication, helped me move through the house and held me through my tears. I checked on him, encouraged him to speak to his friends and made sure that his grief was not treated as secondary simply because I was the one physically recovering. We were both trying to take care of each other while trying to understand moment by moment how to care for ourselves.  

It helped me to organize my thoughts about my grief so that I could articulate it to Jordan. I was mourning the abrupt end of my pregnancy and the birth itself happening so quickly that I didn’t feel fully present inside it the way I had envisioned. There was missing Nathan so much, as well of the life we had envisioned raising our baby. I could tell Jordan which part of my grief I was mourning that moment or whether it was feeling everything all at once.

Jordan did not need the same kind of structure. His sadness felt broader to both him and me, less divided into identifiable parts. We had lost the same son, but our relationships to the loss were not identical. I was grieving the end of my pregnancy, my postpartum body and the physical absence of the baby who had been moving inside me. Jordan was grieving his son and the relationship between a father and his boy that he had already begun experiencing and imagining. We did and didn’t have the same experience, so we just witnessed and loved each other through it.

We moved through those early days accepting support beyond each other. I am so grateful that I didn’t really have to ask the men in our group to show up and be there for Jordan. The boys were quick to book coffees, arrange hikes, continue with golf and check in regularly. They spoke openly about their own experiences with grief, loss and asking for help. None of them had experienced our kind of loss, thankfully, but they understood their role and the call to stay close. Their support mattered because neither Jordan nor I could be the other person’s entire grief system. Our marriage needed care, but so did each of us as individuals.

It was unspoken that we would both commit to individual counselling and participate in our couples grief counselling as well. We needed to discuss our individual experiences and our shared pain. We needed help learning how to remain husband and wife while becoming bereaved parents. Other couples may need different forms of support and not every bereaved parent may have this situation, but this is what grieving together has looked like in our marriage.

The biggest learning for me is that just because we went through the same loss doesn’t mean that we are experiencing the same grief. We do not always need the same thing at the same time. Jordan listens to music to recharge when I need silence. Sometimes I want to go out and he wants to stay in.

Grief has asked us not only to learn our own needs, but to resist judging the other person’s. At one point, Jordan went out and bought new irons, and I couldn’t believe that talking about new golf equipment belonged in the same world where our baby had just died. I understood that Jordan needed to do everything he could for some kind of distraction and normalcy so he would not get consumed. Jordan was doing everything he could to stay himself. On the other hand, I was doing everything I could not to lose myself. For me, that often meant writing, talking to my friends, and facing the grief directly. For Jordan, it looks like stepping outside it long enough to remember that he can still move through the world as himself.

We needed grace for the different ways we returned to ourselves, particularly when one person’s coping seemed incomprehensible to the other.

During an intake meeting so that we could begin our couples grief counselling, I became increasingly upset by the questions and the flow of the conversation. We were only a week out from Nathan’s death, and the process asked us to relive the story in a way that felt unbearable. As I became more agitated, Jordan became upset by the conflict and just wanted us to get through the appointment.

After that, I remember reflecting in my individual counselling that I wanted to be aware of how my grief affected Jordan, and how I did not want to add Jordan’s pain. It was one thing when he was upset because of everything, but another thing when he was upset because of me. I needed to speak up when something felt harmful, but I also wanted to remain aware of how my response affected him.

I was still learning to accept the label of “bereaved mom”, but I knew that I wanted to set boundaries around how I was treated in that vulnerable state. I contacted the coordinator to share feedback about the intake, and she was extremely receptive to reviewing the script and process based on my experience. By apologizing to Jordan and still advocating for myself, I felt empowered to protect our relationship while also helping improve the experience for other families. 

That situation taught me more about our different responses and the different ways we grieve. Even in one of the hardest moments of our marriage, I felt grateful that we were still learning together, repairing, and finding ways to protect ourselves without losing sight of each other.

We had regular check-ins with each other during the first month after Nathan died. We talked about how we were feeling, who we had spoken to that day, and where we were struggling. We shared what had brought comfort, what had hurt, and what we were learning about ourselves.

We’ve kept up couch conversations and walk-and-talks as we have been moving through our grief. Most days, there is nothing new to explain but we’ve continued to talk about missing our son and grieving aloud so that we don’t have to wonder what the other person is thinking or feeling. We keep checking in. We keep learning the shape of the other person’s grief. We allow difference without treating it as distance.

Even though we’ve cleared the three months since Nathan passed and July has given us some reprieve, the summer has been hard. Jordan had imagined watching the World Cup with a baby sleeping on his chest, the way he watched the Masters with Nathan in April. I am supposed to be on my first maternity leave with my first baby. It really feels like there’s a piece of us missing.

The long days and summer plans unfolding around us are reminders of what our life was supposed to look like this season. These months were not supposed to be organized around surviving our grief, managing our energy, and deciding what plans we can handle.

We use comic relief a lot in our marriage. It’s harder to laugh when we are both sad, but when I find ways to make Jordan laugh, I can see how it helps both of us still feel like us. We’ve tried to create small moments of joy without treating them as evidence that we are back to normal. Walks, great meals out, time with friends, and laughing at inside jokes coexist with the pain of missing our baby boy. 

So, we’re working through the summer together.  We talk about what we are feeling and let the waves move through us when they arrive. We both have a fairly good grasp of our individual energy and boundaries. We are also learning to manage them as a couple: how much social time we can handle, when we need to protect time alone, and when being with our people will help us feel more like ourselves.

Our family and village grieve Nathan too, but there is a particular loneliness in being Nathan’s parents. Jordan and I are the two people living closest to the centre of his absence. We are the ones waking up in the home where he was supposed to live, carrying the memories of the NICU and grieving the daily life we expected to have with him. At the beginning and end of each day, it comes back to us, and we miss our son. 

Jordan said in his vows that we’re a team, surrounded by incredible people, but it would always be about the two of us at the end. The work we had already put into our marriage up to this point did not protect us from grief, but it has given us ways to keep reaching for each other inside it.

We brought Nathan into the world through our love for each other as husband and wife. In this life that we continue as his Dad and Mom, we are doing our best to protect that love, choosing each other while allowing our grief to be different, and holding each other through it.