Keeping Your Marriage Strong After the Death of a Child

HEALING THE GRIEVING HEART
Keeping Your Marriage Strong After the Death of a Child
Host: Dr. Gloria Horsley
With guest: Wayne Loder
August 25, 2005

G: Welcome to Healing the Grieving Heart, the show that takes on the difficult topic of healing after the death of a child. My guests and I are here weekly to say even after a devastating death of a child, all is possible. You and your family and your partner can survive, even thrive. Today our topic is Keeping Your Marriage Strong After the Death of a Child. We know that divorce is a conclusion to almost half of marriages today. This statistic burdens couples not only with the suggestion, but with the expectation, that they will fail. Yet the keystone virtue and tenacity and success is hope. Hope that we will make it. Rather than including yourself in the 50% whose marriages fall apart, why not say, “We’ll be the ones that make it—the exception to the rule.” There is a belief out there that couples who have children die are at higher risk for divorce. We are here today to tell you that your marriage can withstand even the death of a beloved child. Ours have. We know you hurt and that grief is hard work. We know you and your partner grieve in different ways and in different rhythms and cycles. We know others have told you that you will never make it. Divorce is just a matter of time. But we are here to tell you that we have made it and so can you. We’ve been there. Have faith. The heart always heals. You may think you will never be able to function again, but my guests and I are here every week to tell you that you will survive, live and can even thrive. You can open your heart and be happy again. Please join us on the show, Keeping Our Marriage Strong, by calling our toll-free number 1-866-369-3742 or email me at gchorsley@aol.com with questions or comments regarding the losses in your life. This show and previous shows are archived on www.Health.VoiceAmerica.com and www.theCompassionateFriends.org. Today, I am so honored and pleased to have as my guest on Healing the Grieving Heart, Keeping Your Marriage Strong, Wayne Loder. Wayne has been a journalist, newspaper reporter, editor, and is currently the Public Awareness Coordinator for The Compassionate Friends. He has been a chapter leader for The Compassionate Friends and, along with his wife, Pat, has edited The Compassionate Friends newsletter, which became the APEX award-winning quarterly magazine, We Need Not Walk Alone. And this is a very special magazine that you can get a hold of through The Compassionate Friends. Wayne and Pat started the Lake Area chapter of The Compassionate Friends in 1993 following the deaths of their only two children at that time, Stephanie and Stephen. Wayne is the husband of Pat Loder, the Executive Director of The Compassionate Friends, and father of Chris, his son, age 13, and Katy, age 11. Wayne, thanks so much for being on the show today, Keeping Your Marriage Strong. How many years have you been married?
W: Hi, Gloria. Well, we have been married for 29 years.
G: How long ago were Stephen and Stephanie killed?
W: They were killed 14 years ago, and so we are coming up on our 15th anniversary of our marriage since they died, and we have 15 years of marriage before they died. So we’re coming up to another one of those anniversaries that we all think about after our child has died.
G: Well, I was thinking about my marriage and I’ve been married for 23 years before my son was killed and 22 years after, so I’m thinking, wow, I’ve been married for 45 years which seems pretty amazing. Well, this is an important topic. I know you and I have talked about this before about keeping marriage strong and some of the myths and some of the things that people who have lost children have been told, and we’ll get to that topic after. But first, I’d like to ask you if you could tell us a bit about your two children being killed and the circumstances around it and maybe a little bit about Pat’s brother who was killed – was he killed or did he die?
W: Well, actually he died and, in fact, I was going to start out with him as I was listening to your question because he was diagnosed with lung cancer at the end of May of 1990 and he died four months later. So that was a pretty rough time for Pat and also for her parents. But I really had no idea that the worst was yet to come. On March 20 of 1991, the very first day of spring (and so that day, unfortunately, has special significance for us), Pat had been helping her father with some work at his home and she had finished up for the day. She said goodbye to her dad, the kids had given him a kiss, and they traveled home, which was only a mile and half away. Both of the kids were seat-belted firmly into the car. As she came to our street, she had to make a left-hand turn and as she was coming to the street, she noticed that there was a motorcyclist who was coming towards her and she waited for him. Then she noticed two motorcycles way down the street and, not feeling any danger at all, she went ahead and started to turn. As she related it to me, she looked back a split second later after she started to turn and saw what she thought was just a mind-boggling horrifying sight because she said to herself, “My God, they’re speeding up.” And before she could even hit the accelerator to get the car through the intersection, one of the motorcyclists struck the car on the passenger side between the front door and the motor compartment. The young man who was driving the motorcycle struck her car on one of these high-speed motorcycles that only had about 500 miles on it and my understanding was that the three motorcyclists, the first one that had met Pat and then the other two, had a bet going and that was that the last one to the bar bought the beer. Well, one of them didn’t make it. The one who hit Pat’s car, we understand accelerated from a traffic light along with his buddy. The first one had actually blown through the red light. The other two waited a moment and then both of them blew through the red light also and, according to the police reports, that’s about a third of a mile down the street from our street, and they just accelerated and the speedometer on the motorcycle was stuck at 114 miles per hour and we do believe that when he hit the car, it was traveling at that speed. His friend said he was probably watching his tachometer instead of the road, which apparently is a common problem with new motorcyclists who have never ridden sport motorcycles before. In any case, the impact pushed Pat’s car 26 feet sideways according to the police and they made the comment that if the motorcyclist had been going the speed limit, Pat not only would have been able to turn onto our street, she would have actually been into our driveway before that motorcycle ever would have reached our street.
G: So certainly impacting your life and your marriage and relationship and changing the life that you thought you were going to live forever.
W: Oh, absolutely. This was a third of a horrifying experience.
G: We’re going to have to come up on break in a moment, but I know that Stephen died immediately, wasn’t it?
W: Yes.
G: Then you went to the hospital with Stephanie, to a totally different hospital from Pat, and she was hospitalized as I remember?
W: Right. Stephen couldn’t be revived and so everyone was taken by ambulance to the hospital and Stephen, they couldn’t revive. They worked on him for two hours. I had finally arrived from work. I had been called and I’d finally arrived from work and after talking to Pat for a few minutes, I was ushered into a family room and it was there that the doctors came in and said that they had worked on Stephen and that they were unable to save him.
G: Oh, my goodness. Well, we need to come up on break now, Wayne. When we get back from break, let’s talk about how you have been able to keep your marriage strong and how after the incident 15 years ago you’ve been able to move on with your life. You’re listening to Healing the Grieving Heart, and I’m your host, Dr. Gloria Horsley. My guest today is Wayne Loder. Wayne has been a journalist, newspaper reporter, editor, and is currently the Public Awareness Coordinator for The Compassionate Friends. He is the husband of Pat Loder, and the father of Chris, age 13, and Katy, age 11. If you’d like to join our show with comments for me or Wayne, please call our toll-free number 1-866-369-3742. This show is archived on www.theCompassionateFriends.org and www.Health.VoiceAmerica.com websites. Stay tuned.
Welcome back to Healing the Grieving Heart. I’m your host, Dr. Gloria Horsley, and my guest today is today is Wayne Loder, journalist, newspaper reporter, editor, and currently Public Awareness Coordinator for The Compassionate Friends. Wayne is the bereaved parent of Stephanie and Stephen, who were killed in an automobile accident in 1991. Our topic today is Keeping Your Marriage Strong After the Death of a Child. Wayne, we were talking before the break about your children being killed in the accident and how devastating it was. And I know Pat was in the hospital after the children were killed and I wondered how over time, it’s been 15 years now, have you dealt with this as a couple?
W: As I was preparing for this show, I was going back over some articles that I’d written and some that Pat had written and I came across a couple of paragraphs that Pat had written in one of her articles that I think really sums up the way that we both feel about it. She wrote, “We had to work our way towards the realization that we were living in a situation that could not be fixed. We needed to deal with the reality of the situation in order to get an understanding of who we now were as individual people and as a couple. One day Wayne looked at me with eyes pleading, begging for understanding, as I bombarded him with a series of questions that had no answers. He finally broke his silence when he said, ‘It’s hard for me to throw you a lifeline when I’m drowning myself.’”
G: Do you remember saying that, Wayne?
W: I do remember saying that because it was like the lights went on in her eyes.
G: And how did you come to that? How did you find that in yourself to say that I’m drowning, too?
W: I don’t know where those words came from except that at that point in time, she was asking me questions. She had always felt that I was the one who could fix anything, that no matter what went wrong, she could come to me and I could fix it. This I couldn’t fix. And as she was asking me questions, I just made that comment because I didn’t know what to do. I sure couldn’t help her if I couldn’t help myself.
G: Do you think that’s a guy kind of thing, the fixing idea in a marriage?
W: Absolutely. In talking with many, many bereaved families, it always seems that the husband was the one who usually was expected to fix everything. I’m not saying that’s the case all the time because I certainly talk with women who have told me that they were really the strong one in the family and when the death of their child happened, the husband completely withdrew and the wife had to handle all of the arrangements, etc.
G: So there are different scenarios than yours was.
W: Absolutely. Every situation is different and I think that’s what we need to keep in mind as we’re looking at marriage and bereavement. No two situations are the same so there are really no universal answers to how to keep a marriage strong. I believe that there are many answers. There are many pieces of the puzzle that you have to put together.
G: Yes, and we really don’t know what keeps couples together. It’s very interesting. There’s been a lot of studies on why couples break up, in fact, John Gottman has done a lot of work on looking at couples and he can tell you that he can tell the large majority of couples that will divorce. He studies them in his lab. But he himself will say that he can’t say what keeps a couple together and why some marriages are more successful than others. But the idea that has been proliferated that couples who have children die probably will divorce has been thrown around for years. Where did you first hear that idea?
W: Well, Pat told me a few months after the kids died that at the hospital, she was given a bereavement packet by the hospital and in that bereavement packet was a booklet that talked about marriage and bereavement and in it it cited astronomical percentages of marriages that failed after the death of a child. And she told me that what went through her mind was the fact that first she had lost Stephen, then Stephanie had died, and now her marriage was going to die.
G: Do you remember what came up for you when she said that?
W: When she said that, I remember saying to her, “Then we’re just going to make certain that we’re not part of those statistics.” And that’s what we have worked to make certain about throughout the rest of our marriage.
G: So you set an intention that your marriage was going to make it through.
W: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Our marriage was very, very strong before the kids died and I wanted to see to it that it remained strong and that our marriage thrived even though we were hurting inside.
G: Now, I think that’s an important point that you’ve just made right now. Your marriage was strong before your child died and you wanted to keep it that way. I think that we do have to look at the way the marriage was previously. We can’t expect some miracle to happen. Or, I would say that a child dying does not necessarily bring us together. We do know that we grieve differently, and in some way it brings us together because we’ve had the same event, but in some ways you may be up when your partner’s down or vice versa. Do you remember any of those times when you were up and Pat was down or the other way around?
W: Oh, I think that because we certainly handled our grief differently, there were certainly many times like that. It was trying to know when to not get in the other person’s way that was important to keep us on an even keel. I think that if we had both approached grief and really just thrown it out there and always talked about it, I think we would have ended up probably having times when we just were not connecting and things that we would say might hit the other person the wrong way. So we try to be very careful to let the person have their space when they needed it and yet to still be available to talk when it was necessary.
G: Now, I think that’s important and sometimes if you’re a very verbal person and you need to talk, I know sometimes we get obsessive about our talking about the event and need to talk about it. It can be a burden on your partner and sometimes you may need to find say a minister or a friend or somebody that you can kind of let out the steam or anger or frustration or whatever and groups like The Compassionate Friends are wonderful places to go to be able to do that so there’s not so much dependence on your partner, to be able to listen to other people and see how they’ve done it, and also to be able to talk about it. It’s almost like a balloon full of hot air sometimes. You just need to let it seep out a little at a time and not blow the whole thing at once. Because one of the things that we know as couples, we need to tell our story and it’s good to tell it to different people sometimes.
W: Absolutely. I think that we had probably rougher times in the beginning because we truly didn’t know any other couple who had had a child who had died.
G: And you’d had two children?
W: Right. We had had two children who had died so it was kind of like we were living in a vacuum. We didn’t know anyone else who we could really relate to and we were searching for other people, but yet we really weren’t mentally able to do that. It wasn’t until a friend of mine told me about The Compassionate Friends, I think this was probably about six months after the kids died, that we decided to go to a meeting and see what it was all about. And I thank God every day that that friend came to me and told me about that because if he had not, I don’t know where we would be today. When we walked into that first Compassionate Friends meeting, we were met by really caring people. We got hugs. After the initial time that the children had died, yes, you get a lot of hugs then, but after that, they start falling off. People stopped coming by and talking to you. They’re uncomfortable with the situation and they just kind of start to stay away. Even in your own family, it can happen. Well, when you go to a Compassionate Friends meeting, it’s completely different. There, you’re not afraid to let out your emotions. That’s why, if you go to a Compassionate Friends conference, you’ll find people hugging. You’ll find people crying. You’ll find people talking.
G: Or, you won’t have to talk if you don’t want to.
W: Or you don’t have to talk.
G: It’s time for us to come up on break again. We’ll get back to this. When we come back from break, I would like to ask you about your and Pat’s decision to have two more children and some of our listeners may be in that dilemma themselves, and let’s talk about that and also more about The Compassionate Friends. We’re coming up on break and my guest today is Wayne Loder, Public Awareness Coordinator of The Compassionate Friends, bereaved parent of Stephen and Stephanie, and husband of Pat Loder, and father to Chris, age 13, and Katy, age 11. Please stay tuned for our show on Keeping Your Marriage Strong. I’m your host, Dr. Gloria Horsley.
Welcome back to Healing the Grieving Heart. I’m your host, Dr. Gloria Horsley, and my guest today is Wayne Loder, journalist, newspaper reporter, editor, and currently the Public Awareness Coordinator for The Compassionate Friends. Wayne is the bereaved parent of Stephanie and Stephen, who were killed in an automobile accident in 1991. Our topic today is Keeping Your Marriage Strong After the Death of a Child. Wayne and Pat currently have two children, Chris, age 13, and Katy, age 11. Wayne, I wanted to take an email before we move on. We have an email here from Susan from Boothbay Harbor, Maine. Susan says,
I notice that you are having a show on marriage. My son died of a brain tumor two years ago. We have two other kids and we seem to be doing okay. However, my husband has a friend who is separated from his wife and he is giving him a lot of support. I feel really uncomfortable about him going around with a guy who is having marital problems. I have heard that we are at risk for divorce and I would appreciate your thoughts. Susan
W: I’d like to field that question. Susan, I guess what I would say to you is that divorce isn’t catching and what your husband may actually be finding as he is with his friend is that his friend really wishes and hopes that his marriage will survive. No one wants to be alone. One truly is the loneliest number. My suspicion is that what your husband’s friend is telling him is, “I know you’ve been through something that is really horrific. You’ve got a great wife. You really need to do everything that you can to keep that marriage alive.” So, if anything, I would encourage your husband to spend as much time as he wants with his friend. I don’t think that there’s a problem there.
G: Okay. Also, Susan, if you’re feeling a little uncomfortable, why don’t you have him over for dinner, too, and kind of make it a threesome, and that might make you feel a little more comfortable, too. I think, Wayne, one of the things that you’re getting at and one of the things that I’ve kind of heard from you about The Compassionate Friends is it’s hard for a guy to have other guys who will listen to them, who will hang out with them, who will give them a hug, and that’s the kind of things we need after we’ve had a child die.
W: Absolutely. Women, I believe, and I think more people tend to believe, tend to express themselves a lot better in mixed company, and men tend to be the more quiet type in those situations. They’re not going to express the pain that they’re feeling because that’s not the way that the macho aspect of the male makeup is handled. So it’s great when men are able to talk with each other. That does happen at Compassionate Friends’ meetings, too. I think that’s one of the good things about TCF meetings is men should feel that they are welcome and they will have that opportunity.
G: Wayne, what would your major piece of advice be that you might give to those couples who have lost their child as couples?
W: Okay. I guess what I would say is take the time that you need before you make any hasty decisions about anything. You’re really in a state of shock at that point and you have to take time. You have to search your soul and figure out with what’s happened what direction your life will lead. Where is it going to go to? And this includes your work and your marriage and your family and when you have a plan, you’ll feel you have some control over the situation and this makes it easier to reach your new goals. Because there will be new goals. What was important before your child died no longer has the same importance. So you’re going to be changed. You will have new goals. There will be different things that you will want to accomplish with your life, and you need to actually look at these, maybe even write them down.
G: Maybe set some couple’s goals and some individual goals. One of the things that I would suggest which is not exactly a goal but something to do is have a date night. Try to plan a time when you will have some fun together and talk about what you can do or even a family night. I’ve talked about this before. Small things. Maybe just going out for an ice cream cone at first. Maybe just taking a walk night. My inlaws used to take a walk around the block every night, literally just one block. So anything you can do. Intimacy is a big issue and one of the things I want to talk to Wayne about now is how he and Pat decided to have more children. The intimacy, I have some thoughts on that about holding hands and touching and kind of going slowly. But, Wayne, could you tell us a little bit about your’s and Pat’s decision to have two more children?
W: When the kids died, I had just turned 40, and we had a great celebration, by the way. I didn’t realize it was going to be marred by something as tragic as this. But definitely, the biological clock aspect of it.
G: Was Pat younger than you?
W: Pat was younger than me by a few years.
G: And how many would that be? How old was she?
W: She is four years younger than I am. She was 36. I was 40. We knew we had to make a decision and that would be a decision that we would live with for the rest of our lives. So on the one hand, we knew we wanted more children. We wanted to feel little hands in ours again. But on the other hand, we didn’t want to take a chance of the possibility of future losses because, unfortunately, as we have found out in other situations, lightening can strike twice. So we had to weigh both of those things and we finally came to the conclusion that we had so much love to give, we’d be depriving ourselves of what we consider probably the greatest of life’s experience and that’s having children, watching them grow up, one day getting married, and then starting that cycle over again with their own children.
G: Could you tell me about when Pat told you she was pregnant? I was just wondering what that moment was like when she found out.
W: I’m sure that I probably jumped up about three feet in the air when I heard that. I was absolutely elated and yet I was dumbstruck at the same time because I didn’t know whether or not we were ever going to have more children. In fact, the odds were against it from everything that we had been told by our doctors. But it happened and it happened a second time. And we were just so fantastically happy with it and we have never, ever regretted that decision. Now I’m not saying that that’s right for everyone.
G: Or that everyone can possibly do that.
W: And that’s right. I certainly know many other people that have been able to have more children and some have chosen other routes, which I think is great. Certainly, we would have considered adoption had we not been able to have more biological children. But definitely some people we know have decided not to have children in their lives or futures. I would say that I have heard more people say that they wished that they’d had gone ahead and had more children or arranged something, an adoption or being a foster parent or whatever than people who said that they didn’t.
G: I had three girls and Scott was our only son and actually we thought about it but I was like 42 or something and so we thought better of it, but I do think you think about it. Now that was a year after Stephanie and Stephen were killed?
W: Roughly. A little bit over a year.
G: That Chris was born – a little bit over a year later. So he’s 13 and Katy, 11. Yes, I know that this is a big decision for people and, as I say, not everyone is able to make this decision. That was a stressful time for you. How did you deal with it as a couple? Pat being pregnant at that time must have needed a lot of support. How was that on your marriage and how did that go?
W: Well, certainly we were having our own struggles from that standpoint. Another thing that played a role in here is that Pat’s father had become very ill and we felt that it was necessary to take him into our house and to help as best we could to nurse him back.
G: And Pat was pregnant and she had her father in the house and you were grieving your two children?
W: That’s right.
G: Wow. That’s incredible.
W: We felt that obligation. He was a great man. He gave us great support when the kids died. I believe that part of his ill health did come on after his grandkids died as well as his son, and we wanted to help him. So he was there. We tended to his needs, and so that did add an extra stress to our recovery, if you want to put it that way. But eventually, unfortunately, he did pass away. We continued as time went along to work on our marriage even as Pat was having more children.
G: Did you ever have any professional help? A counselor or anything?
W: There are very few people who have had a child who died who haven’t had some type of professional help. Whether it’s been helpful? – I guess that depends on the person and on the professional who they go to.
G: Did you do anything?
W: Oh, yes.
G: You, did, okay. Was it helpful?
W: The professionals who knew nothing about how to handle parents whose child had died other than what they had read in textbooks were really not very helpful because they really didn’t have much credibility with me. I knew one person who did have a child who had died, and this person certainly could relate and certainly was very helpful. So I think it depends on who it is.
G: Yes. I think we’ve talked about that on previous shows that there’s nothing wrong with getting some professional help. It’s great. But make sure. There are many, many grief centers in the United States right now and most towns have them. Find somebody who actually understands the field and as Wayne said, has not just read about it, and I would be very happy to have you email me at gchorsley@aol.com and I will help you find someone to work with your family if you need that. It’s time for us to come up on break again. Please stay tuned for more comments and advice from our guest Wayne Loder and to hear about next week’s special topic and guest. You’re listening to VoiceAmerica. I’m your host Dr. Gloria Horsley. Please stay tuned.
Welcome back to Healing the Grieving Heart. I’m your host Dr. Gloria Horsley. My guest today is Wayne Loder, journalist, newspaper reporter, editor, and currently Public Awareness Coordinator for The Compassionate Friends. Wayne has been a chapter leader of The Compassionate Friends and along with his wife, Pat, has edited the TCF newsletter, which became the APEX award-winning quarterly magazine, We Need Not Walk Alone. Wayne and Pat’s only children, Stephen and Stephanie, were killed in an automobile accident in 1991. I should say only children at that time. Now they have a son Chris, 13, and a daughter Katy, 11. Wayne, before we move one, I want to read you an email, and then I know during break you said that there was a survey that you wanted to talk to me about regarding keeping your marriage strong. We have an email here from Ray from Houston, Texas. He says:
Dear Dr. Horsley,
I have found your show very helpful since our baby died shortly after birth. It has been two months and my wife is still crying a lot. She won’t even let me hug her. It was our first child. Do you have any suggestions? I’m feeling lonely and shut out. She talks a lot to her mother. Ray
Do you have any thoughts about that for him?
W: Well, it’s only been two months. I think what we’re really talking about here is intimacy. I think we’re talking about how we have to approach becoming the people on a personal basis that we were before our children died. And in this case, Ray had a baby die and he mentioned that his wife had been crying every day. Let me say first off, that is not unusual. I woke up many mornings and Pat would be sobbing over the loss of our children, so that’s certainly not unusual. I think what he needs to do is he needs to hug her and she may not want him to hug her but I think it’s something that she may eventually welcome. I think it’s got to come back.
G: One of the things, Ray, I’d say to you is, it has been two months. There are a lot of biological hormones going around for women particularly if she was planning on breastfeeding and she can’t do that. So there are a lot of things going on. I think Ray probably needs to take a look at his relationship prior to the baby’s death. What kind of an intimacy did they have at that time? What kind of a sexual relationship did they have? Maybe do a little thoughtful assessment of that and see if he’d had a good relationship before, he certainly should have a good one after, and if that’s not happening, as Wayne says, gradually, you put your arm around her, you hold her hand, talk to her about it, and then I would certainly suggest that he move on and get some professional help if it’s a big change from before their child died. But go slowly. As Wayne says, it’s only been two months. So Wayne you were talking during break about a survey on marriage. Could you talk to us a little bit about it? It was supported by Compassionate Friends.
W: It was actually a survey that was done on behalf of The Compassionate Friends and it covered a number of different areas that we wanted to learn about as an organization. But one of the areas had to do with divorce, the divorce statistics, and the high numbers of divorces that you always read are the case. We were very suspect of those figures and so the survey turned out to be very revealing. Overall in this survey, 72% of parents who were married at the time of their child’s death were still married to the same person. Of the remaining 28% of marriages, 16% had had a spouse who had died. So only 12% of the marriages actually ended up in divorce.
G: Which is kind of amazing because we know there’s about a 50% divorce rate in the population as a whole.
W: This is an amazing statistic. It flies in the face of everything you read about. As a journalist, I had read that statistic over the years. I, of course, had run into it with Pat’s experience with the hospital information.
G: What is the statistic people said? I know in a very prominent grieving book it said 75% of people will divorce.
W: I’ve read in books anywhere from 70 to 90% figures, and I’ve also read that in newspaper articles and magazine articles and the journalist in me has tried to follow up on that. In fact, I’ve made many telephone calls trying to find out where these professionals or newspaper reporters got these figures because they’re stating them as fact and invariably it would lead to nowhere. In other words, they would say they had received that information from someone else, I would call them, they said I got it from someone else, and then you call them and they say well, I don’t really know where I got it but everyone knows it’s true. So it is a myth.
G: If there’s anything we could accomplish on this show today, it would be for all of you out there to tell all the professionals that you know that having a child die is not a cause of divorce. There is not a direct causal relationship and we don’t know that there is a direct causal relationship. You could email me and I’m sure Wayne would be glad to give you a copy of the survey or send a copy of the survey to you to give to your professional friends and let them know that this is the case and we really need to spread the word around about this, don’t you think, Wayne?
W: I definitely agree with that and I do try to spread around the word as much as I can. There is a summary of the study on our national website at thecompassionatefriends.org so anyone is welcome to go to our website and take a look at the summary of the survey.
G: That’s great. That’s a great place to do it. I recently was having a psychiatrist on the show who actually was a bereaved parent and somehow we got talking and he said, “Well, you know, there’s a very high divorce rate, there’s a very high chance of divorcing after your child dies.” And I said, “Well, I don’t know about that. Where do you get that statistic from? That’s not the case that we found in this survey.” And he was very surprised even as a psychiatrist and a bereaved parent. So there is a lot of word out there about that. Well, Wayne, before we close the show, I wanted to ask you kind of a switch question, why do you think you didn’t get divorced?
W: Well, I had the very good fortune of really marrying my best friend and we went through a traumatic experience but we stayed best friends. And in staying best friends, our marriage stayed strong. The way that I have put it to other people is the roots had grown deep and the tree wasn’t about to fall. So I think if you had a good marriage beforehand, you’ll have a good marriage afterwards. You just have to give it a chance.
G: I love that about the roots growing deep and the tree doesn’t fall, and keep growing those little roots. There are things that you can do. I sometimes say to people marriage is a process of falling in and out of love. Sometimes you’re feeling more loving towards that partner, but as Wayne said, if you’re best friends, you have those roots that go deep. And having a child die actually in a lot of ways, even deepens the roots because you go through a really incredible life experience together.
W: There’s no question about that and I guess that if you were to ask me about anything that we really had not covered during this program, I guess that I would say that we just really hadn’t discussed why it is that such a small percentage of couples appear to end up divorcing after they have really been through the greatest stress factor of them all, the death of a child. I’ve thought about this many times, and I truly believe that it is because it’s a common bond. The loss of a child tends to bring the parents together. I really believe that is the case. They’re facing a common loss, they are the only two people who have had an experience with the children together.
G: Yes. Well, it’s time to close our show now, Wayne, and I want to thank you again for being my guest and for sharing your thoughts on keeping our marriage strong with our audience today. You and Pat and your sweet family are an inspiration to us all and I want to thank Chris and Katy for being in our life. And Wayne, you do great work for The Compassionate Friends and it’s been a pleasure not only to have you on the show, but to count you as a friend. Thank you, Wayne.
W: I feel the same way. Thank you.
G: Please stay tuned again next week when my guest will be Susan Hawkes, registered nurse and bereavement counselor. Susan will discuss the challenges of grieving a loss of a baby through miscarriage, ectopic pregnancy, stillbirth, or early infant death. Tell your friends about the show. Healing the Grieving Heart is archived on www.Health.VoiceAmerica.com and www.theCompassionateFriends.org websites. This is Dr. Gloria Horsley. Please stay tuned again next Thursday at 9:00 a.m. Pacific for more of Healing the Grieving Heart, a show of hope, renewal, and support. Remember, you need not walk alone.