11/06/2026
there’s a side of marriage that only parents who have lost a child will ever understand.
the hospital rooms. the impossible decisions. the moment your entire world comes crashing down. planning a funeral instead of a future. picking out clothes for your child to be cremated or buried in. walking back into a house that will never feel the same again. watching the person you love most in this world experience the worst pain imaginable and knowing there’s absolutely nothing you can do to fix it.
and then you’re expected to just keep living.
you go back to work. pay the bills. do the laundry. watch the rest of the world move on while you’re both still stuck on the worst day of your lives. birthdays, holidays, family pictures. everything has someone missing.
and the hardest part is you don’t always grieve the same way.
sometimes one of you needs to talk and the other can’t even get out of bed. sometimes one of you is angry and the other is numb. sometimes you’re both drowning so badly that neither of you has anything left to give the other.
sometimes you’re angry at the world. sometimes you’re angry at each other. sometimes you’re just two completely broken people trying to survive another day.
and nobody talks about how lonely that can be. lying next to the only other person in the world who knows exactly what you’ve lost, and somehow still feeling completely alone.
because you’re not just grieving your child. you’re grieving the entire future you were supposed to have together. the family you were supposed to be. the people you were before everything happened.
and unless you’ve been there, you really can’t understand what that does to a marriage. the guilt, the anger, the silence, the way grief changes absolutely everything.
no, we don’t get the luxury of an ordinary marriage.
our marriage was built on love, but it’s been tested by a kind of heartbreak no two people should ever have to survive.
and through all that wreckage we’re still choosing each other.
not because losing a child made us stronger. i’d give anything to be the people we were before.
but because we’re the only two people who remember what our whole family felt like.