To protect our marriages and to foster strength in even the darkest of valleys, we need to grant one another the right to grieve in different ways and according to longer or shorter timelines. We need to bear with one another in love, trusting that the God who led us into this valley will lead us both out.

Few pains are deeper than the pain of losing a child. Yet, the pain can be made all the worse when the loss of a child leads to the loss of a marriage. While there appears to be no factual basis for the common statistic that 75–90% of marriages fail after the death of a child, it is obvious that a great loss can still put enormous strain on a relationship. It is likely that most of us have seen a marriage falter or even fail under the weight of such a heavy blow.

In the early days of my family’s grief, Aileen and I were gently cautioned that if we did not faithfully tend to our marriage, we might learn too late that grief had driven us far apart. We were told that we would almost certainly experience grief in different ways, and that much of the challenge to our relationship would arise from these differences.

While I’m grateful that our marriage survived intact and was even strengthened, we found that these cautions proved true: we grieved in different ways and, even more challengingly, according to different timelines. Since that time, I have heard many others express the same fact: Spouses often grieve differently, and these differences add to the already-grueling challenge of losing a child.

Looking back, I think there were three big questions that lurked behind our grief: Why did this happen? What do I do with it? And when will things be normal again? Two of these questions exposed the differences between us and offered the opportunity to either grow closer or to pull apart.

Why Did This Happen?

After Nick’s sudden, unexpected, and unexplained death, we couldn’t help but wonder the big “why” questions. Why did this happen? Why did God let this happen? Why did God decree that this would happen at this time and in this way? Though we couldn’t help but ask such questions, we knew we would never be able to answer them with confidence or authority. We were convinced that speculation would only be unhelpful. The question of purpose is one that belongs to God, the one to whom all the secret things belong (Deuteronomy 29:29). God withheld the “why” and called us to simply trust him. We were content to do this, though we hope that in eternity he will make it plain so that we may praise him all the more for what we are certain was an act of great wisdom and love.

What Do I Do with It?

This is the question of how we would respond to our grief, how we would process it, and what form it would take. It was the question of what the early months or years would be like and how we would respond to our sorrow in what we hoped would be a distinctly Christian manner.

There is a universal challenge when it comes to grief, and it’s that each of us believes the way we grieve is the right way or the best way. This being the case, we are all prone to believe that another person’s grief is normal or healthy only to the degree that it is similar to our own. The one whose grief involves engaging a counselor may be tempted to think the one who feels no need for counseling is living in denial. The one whose grief involves scouring books may be concerned that the one who cannot bring herself to read may be thinking poorly or not thinking at all. The one who runs straight to Scripture may look down on the one who has trouble relating to God for a time.

Read More