Growing in Grief With Your Spouse

It was just a month or so after our first daughter had passed away and my husband went out for some fun with a buddy of his. I was a bit aghast at the thought. How could he go out and have “fun” when we had just lost our daughter? For much of the initial weeks after her death our grief had been quite similar. We had shed many tears together, felt each other’s pain and it seemed were navigating grief in the same ways.

Until we weren’t.

And simply because my husband’s expression of grief was different than mine, I thought my husband had stopped grieving. I most certainly had not.

What I didn’t realize was how differently two people can grieve. And initially, our disconnect in our grief began to feel like a disconnect in our relationship.

How do you grow together when you are experiencing the emotions of your pain so differently? I didn’t understand or validate his need to go out with a buddy and have some respite from the intensity of the pain in our home simply because that is not what I felt I needed.

I had to learn over time that my way of grieving isn’t the right way of grieving, and his way of grieving isn’t the wrong way. Through counsel from others and good ole communication, we began to learn how to grieve both separately and together. Then, we had to take these experiences and learn them in far deeper ways when we lost our second daughter 14 months after losing our first.

And grieving as a couple had been a difficult task. It has and continues to take work, work that is hard to step into when you are weary in your loss or losses. Grief can draw you nearer in understanding what the vows you took really meant, what it means that you are laying down your life for another, and that you are each others’ best provision to walk through both the joys and sorrows of life with. It is a season where the greatest work is trusting the Holy Spirit to enable you to live out the vows you made when it feels so hard to put one foot in front of the other.

Through our own successes and failures, I want to offer you 5 ways that I believe we can draw near to our spouse in seasons of grief.

1. Ask trusted friends and family to be praying for your marriage. Kevin and I knew that grief could pull us a part or together. It didn’t matter how much we were in it together, loved each other and wanted to walk through grief well together we knew we were not invincible and could not journey well through this apart from others lifting us up in prayer and even counseling us in the areas where we could and eventually would get stuck.
2. Give your spouse freedom to grieve differently than you. This has been the hardest one for me to navigate with Kevin. I wear my emotions on my sleeve, so it should come as no surprise when I tell you that my mourning has more often come out in tears and deep sadness. And while Kevin has shed his share of tears, his grief more often came out quite differently. This confused me. When he stopped shedding tears daily, I wondered if he was truly sad and missing our girls. I wanted him to grieve like me. And truthfully, I wrongfully assumed that the only way to grieve was, well, like me. This made both of us feel quite alone, for Kevin would often feel that I didn’t think it was ok for him to be where he was at. We struggled to find common ground and realize we could be in it together even if we weren’t “feeling” the same thing about grief. As we learned to validate the others emotions and not assume what those emotions (or lack thereof) meant about the other’s grief we began to be able to more freely move towards one another and in turn be influenced by the other’s grief 
3. Allow the ways you grieve to influence one another. I remember sitting across from someone giving us counsel, talking through the difficulties we both were experiencing in grieving so differently. We were posed with an interesting question: “How can you influence each other in your grief?” For example, when I thought of our girls, I was often filled with sadness about all that I was missing. When Kevin thought of our girls, he would often think of all that they had gained and what it was like for them in heaven. Kevin experienced times of missing things and sadness but often they came when I wasn’t around, and I never knew about it. Kevin was encouraged to tell me when he was experiencing sadness, even if it happened when I wasn’t there, and I was encouraged to let him in on times that I did think of what our girls were experiencing in heaven. In these small ways and others, we were learning how to grieve together, though differently, by letting each other in to the ways we grieved and even engaging, in small ways, in the other’s grief.
4. Let your spouse know your goal is not to stay in the place you are in your grief forever. This is especially true when sadness is overwhelming and seems to cloud all that you do. It’s important that your spouse knows that you don’t want to stay sad forever, that your goal is to work through your grief, that you don’t know how long you will feel the intensity of this pain but you’re desire is to move through it. This was especially helpful for Kevin to hear from me and allowed greater communication between the two of us as well as gave us patience with one another in our own journeys with grief.
5. Do something fun together. I know this will most likely be a hard one for one of the spouses, but it’s important to inject some lightness in the midst of the pain. It may be a step of faith for one and it may be something quite small. For months my husband wanted to dance, and I just couldn’t. So we found other things to do together until dancing was something I felt like I could step into again.

For most couples that I have talked to, the mother will be the one that carries the heaviness of the grief the longest. There is a difference in the way a father experiences the loss of a child and the way a mother experiences a loss of a child, and neither person is wrong in the way they experience it; it is just different. For me, I had to realize that since I carried our daughters both in my womb for 9 months there was a different kind of attachment I had to them than Kevin, and so, a different kind of grief.

As we allow our spouses to grieve differently than us, learn to communicate and trust God to be the sustainer of our vows and marriage instead of pulling us apart, grief can draw us closer together and even be a piece of how God has chosen to use us in each other’s lives to make us more like Himself.

Hi! I’m Lindsey. I live in Orlando, Florida with my stud of a husband Kevin. We have 3 incredible children, Sophie and Dasah who now live with Jesus and Jaden who came into our lives through adoption. We have a very energetic golden retriever and love living in the sunshine state. I get to spend my days loving on my son, investing my life in college students here through a non-profit organization we’re a part of and when I have time, writing on my blog about the hope that doesn’t disappoint!

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