In this period of time between Mother's and Father's Days, I am thrown back in time. It was during these same few weeks that John and I suddenly became bereaved parents. On Mothers day, I happily opened gifts from two children; on Father's Day, John sadly opened just one. Each Father's Day since has been a reminder to me of just how
differently Ty's death affected each of us.

It's so easy for people to make flat statements about other people's grief. "If they love each other, they can get through this." "If their marriage falls apart, there was something wrong with it to start with." "Something like this can really make or break a marriage." The feeling was that this was somehow a test of our love - if we survived, then we won. Frankly, we weren't up to a test. We had lost enough already.

As you have undoubtedly realised, everyone must bear his own pain. It's just not true that you can share it - wouldn't we all give it away if we could. I didn't know that then, and what I wanted the most was to share my pain with John, and to take some from his aching heart. What we learned was what Harriet Sarnoff Schiff says in "The Bereaved
Parent." "A common grief is not the best possible adhesive to cement a marriage."

That is a shocking disappointment to realise when you are reaching with desperate fingers from opposite ends of a sinking lifeboat.

I had expected John to be his usual "tower of strength". He had expected me to be my usual organised self, to
somehow put this in order. Under the weight of our individual sorrow, we failed miserably at these roles we had, up till then, successfully filled. What we both needed to do was to grieve - freely, fully, with no restrictions. It was too hard to do with each other.

A large part of the problem was that we were suddenly forced to deal with a situation that we had been given no preparation for. Like many bereaved parents, this was our first mutual experience with the death of an oh-so-loved one. I didn't have a clue what to do for him.

He was equally at loss, and that seemed to make a very bad situation much worse.

We were lucky to have friends and family to lean on. It seemed easier for me than for John though. While I had friends I could cry with, his friends, like many men, weren't comfortable with tears or painful reminiscing. I still cringe when I recall what one of John's closest friends said, in a way of a compliment: "At least you didn't make the rest of us feel bad." That unfortunately, sums up what makes it so hard for any two people to grieve together, but especially parents: we don't want to make the other person feel bad.

The most helpful thing for our marriage was the availability of meetings. John, quiet honestly, went only because I asked him to, but there he learned things that helped him understand my grief. He heard other mothers describe their aching arms and he saw that I wasn't going crazy - I was grieving in a pretty usual way. I learned the same sort of things about his grief. I saw how much harder it was for the dads to express their pain.