Partners

Hub and I share a lost daughter together, but we live our grief alone.  We walked side by side, hand in hand through this nightmare.  Now we each have to grieve within our bodies and within our own individual minds.  There is no company for this.  Not even in those rare couples who share thoughts and feelings openly with each other. 

We are not one of those, anyway.

I see this all the time in both of my support groups (infant loss and heartbreaking choice).  One very stereotypical divide is this: 

The mother cries every day and can barely function for weeks to months.  Even when things settle in, she still wants to talk about her baby -- maybe even cry about her baby -- for many months more.  She's afraid that the world will forget her baby.  She gets angry with her friends and family for saying the wrong things, doing the wrong things, but what is right and wrong is hard to predict.  She memorializes her baby through physical objects: the ashes, a token, maybe even a tattoo. She might visit the grave every day.  Or maybe she memorializes her baby through fundraisers, trying to make some meaning out of the senseless loss.  Maybe she feels strongly driven to get pregnant again, to start over.  When it doesn't happen easily, every period requires its own special grief.

The father has one gigantic falling apart.  He is angry.  So angry!  He pulls himself together and goes to work again right away.  People ask him "How's your wife holding up?" looking right past the fact that he is struggling to make it through the day.  Or maybe they ignore his loss altogether.  He will never forget holding his dead infant in his arms, and feels no need to prove this to anybody.  It's nobody else's business.  He throws himself into his work.  Better to grieve with a roof over your head than in a tent because you got evicted. 

She pesters her husband because he's not demonstrating the outward symbols of grief (tears, talk) that she equates with love for his child.  He worries that she is dwelling, and that she should be further along than she is.  It is almost impossible for one to avoid putting expectations on the other's grief.  But they'd both find more peace if they achieved this. 

Our family does not fit these stereotypes perfectly (no tattoos here), but I am certainly the high processor (thoughts! feelings!) and Hub is the stoic, high-functioning type.  If he didn't occasionally let out a tiny thought or insight, I would be absolutely certain that he had moved on within two weeks of our loss.  What I can glean is this: Laurel matters to him.  He feels his loss.  He cares.  But for him, it is SO drastically different than it is for me.  If we have any feelings in common at all, they do not ever coincide.  I have to remind myself there's nothing wrong with my quiet husband, or with his love.  I also have to remind myself that  all my to-do doesn't make me deficient in any way.  I'm not crazy.  His way is the only authentic way for him and my way is the only authentic way for me, and authentic response is the best way to honor our Laurel. 

The distance between us feels vast at times, as though we're on different planets.  Maybe we are.  

It gets tricky when our needs come up against one another.  Notably, my need for connection and openness vs. Hub's need for absolute privacy, even secrecy.

I have no answer for that.  There's no easy compromise when he says, "I will never be okay with you telling anybody.  It will always feel like betrayal."  And I say, "I need to open up or I will get stuck in this grief and this shame and it will destroy me."  But there you have it.