Grieving Together, Separately

You hear many things about grief – “it comes and goes in waves”, “there’s no wrong way to grieve” and “everyone grieves differently”. In my experience, these are all true, but the last one was incredibly real after the loss of my daughter.

What do you do when you’re not the only one hurting?
What do you do when your partner has also lost their child?
And, more importantly how do you cope when the two of you are grieving in vastly different ways?

For me, and for others who have reached out to me who have experienced a similar loss, it was our reality that our male counterparts were grieving in ways foreign to us. I know for me, I wanted to address the loss of our daughter, I allowed myself to feel every emotion that came with her passing- even as raw, powerful and ever-changing as those emotions were and I wanted to talk through my feelings, my grief, my pain. It was hard to understand my partner at the time, who had also suffered and experienced the same loss I had. But, I realized that was the thing- while the reality was we had both seemingly lost our daughter, we hadn’t quite experienced or even processed it the same- our experiences were not identical.

This is not in any way to say a father’s grief is less than a mothers. But, I had to come to terms with the fact the reality was, I had felt her in my belly – felt her grow as I grew with her, felt her kick and somersault. I was the one who knew something was wrong when she got sick and sought help from my doctor- I shared that connection with her. For her father, it was different. While he held her after her delivery, he had never felt her flutter as she moved, his body didn’t change as she grew and he didn’t feel the absence of her within him when she was taken from us prematurely. For him, denial seemed to be the best coping mechanism, which was tough to digest for someone who felt it all and desperately ached to go through the “healing process”, as painful as that healing may be.

So the question remains, how do you heal while also trying to understand and help your partners healing process? It’s not an easy feat as the emotions are heavily related, but experienced on such different levels. My partner struggled with ever having been a father, while I felt and feel so much like a mother. They say there’s supposedly five stages of grief – denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance , but we know that’s no such thing! It’s easy to quantify and break it down like that, but anyone who’s truly experienced it, knows there’s so much more. The added confusion and frustration of trying to work through the devastating loss of your child, while feeling at times like you’re going through it alone, is an added variable.

How do you grieve together when you feel so alone?

Unfortunately, I can’t offer a hard and fast answer, as I don’t believe there is one. If there is, I never found it. What I did find, is that you’re not alone in this grief- there are others- your partner, your family, your friends. They are not only there for support, but are also experiencing levels of this loss as well. For me, it wasn’t always about knowing or even understanding, it was about feeling. Yes, I felt angry. Yes, I felt denial and yes, I eventually felt acceptance. But, what’s not covered in the “5 stages of grief”- You feel love and eventually…eventually you feel happy. Whether you come out of this storm together, or you come out alone, you come out. You survive.