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My husband and I lost our daughter a month ago. It was such a great blow. She was 4 years old and a sickle cell patient. My husband was so fond of her and I’m not sure he can recover from the shock. I’m scared my marriage can be affected, he’s been acting funny.
The death of a child is a violation of the natural order of things. Parents expect their children to bury them, not they bury their children. Since this natural order has been disrupted, parents must now readapt to a new, seemingly illogical reality. The personal identity of each parent, which was tied to their child, has been changed as well as their behavior and lifestyle. They lose a part of their future and self. Parents tend to feel impotent and to feel a great sense of remorse and guilt over not protecting their child from death. The life of each parent is forever changed; the marital dyad is forever changed as well. There is a great need for each spouse to know how things need to be between them when they lose a child. After the death of a child, majority of marriages end in divorce. The actual facts bear out that the death of a child usually acts, instead, to polarize the existing factors found in the marriage; hence, some marriage get worse, some get better, some just maintain, and some actually do end in divorce. Marriages that have sustained the loss of a child through death experience the same valleys and peaks as any other marriage, just in a more exaggerated form. Whether they become better or worse, the one sure thing is that the marriage will never be the same again as it was before the child’s death.
The death of a child usually lead to some of these issues in marriage; sexual problems, emotional distance, more conflict and fighting, and if the child was the glue that held the marriage together, then the foundation of such marriage might crumble after the death of the child. Males tend to grieve very privately. They cry, but they cry in private, they want to be alone, work it out in private, and wives would do well to let them have their space. Husbands feel a great pain when people ask how his wife is doing, but they never stop to inquire about him. In many case studies, this repeatedly came up that men saw this as a dagger, as if their grief was less and unimportant. Counselors would do well to take this to heart and include and welcome the fathers and realize tears are not the only signs of grief. Men also reported that some of the sharpest pain they felt came from the fact that they could not protect their child. They feel a particular shame and helplessness that comes when they fail to do what they believe is their job to do, protect their family and especially their child.