When a Marriage Is Hit With the ‘Worst Loss’

Three years ago, death of the most wrongful sort claimed two victims in Joe and Donna’s Los Angeles household. (They asked that their real names not be used.)

The first victim was the couple’s 18-month-old daughter, Melanie, who died from a malignant brain tumor. The second was more unexpected: Joe and Donna’s once-strong, six-year marriage, which crumbled in the aftermath of their child’s passing.

“Both of them were lost in fear and grief,” says a psychologist who counseled Donna. “They were unable to sustain each other.”

Of all the tribulations that test the bonds of marriage, none is as overwhelming as the death of a child. Although there are no studies to correlate deaths with divorces, psychologists and other therapists say they are long accustomed to seeing the events in tandem. A child’s death, they say, invariably triggers a pathology in the surviving family, with many previously healthy unions succumbing to the weight of the tragedy.

“There is a significant rise in divorces in families whose children have died,” says Arthur Kovacs, a Santa Monica psychologist who treats patients suffering from grief. The husband and wife “cry out for comfort and no one has any to give.” Says one San Diego mother whose adolescent son died five years ago: “When you lose a child, your losses are just beginning.”

Nationally, about 65,000 children die every year, and there are several well-known groups--such as Parents of Murdered Children and Compassionate Friends--that provide support and information to bereaved parents. The day of the Oklahoma City bombing, members of local and regional chapters of Compassionate Friends arrived at the site to aid parents of the children lost in the building.

Ultimately, however, the burden of grief, blame and anger is borne by the mother and father, collectively as parents, but also as individuals. And that, therapists say, is where the secondary trauma begins. For no matter how strong the marriage might have been, the passage through the pain of losing a child is always a journey taken alone.

“Grief for a child doesn’t conform to the other normal expectations of other griefs,” says Barbara Rosof, a San Diego psychotherapist and author of “The Worst Loss: How Families Heal From the Death of a Child” (Henry Holt & Co., 1994). “Even though a couple is married, there’s a feeling that they’re going through it alone. Each partner is wrapped up in their own grief.”

The time after a child’s death means a lengthy spell of acute agony, Rosof says, a period of up to a year and a half when “you walk around like you’ve been hit over the head with a baseball bat.”

Paradoxically, it also is a time often marked by intense isolation from one’s spouse, despite the other partner being the only person sharing the experience and suffering a commensurate amount of pain. Such isolation bodes badly for any marriage, Rosof says, but is especially destructive during a time when spouses need to communicate with one another more than ever.

“Instead of being able to help and support your partner, you feel so empty and numb and devastated, you don’t have much to give,” Rosof says. “People are so overwhelmed that they are not reflecting on the state of the marriage for a long time. The notion that tragedy brings people closer together is a lovely, wishful fantasy.”

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Many factors can influence a marriage struggling in the aftermath of a child’s death. Sometimes the child may have been the only element holding a shaky marriage together. In instances where one parent was responsible for the child at the time of death, the chances of a marriage’s enduring worsen as blame is added to the guilt. “Those are almost intolerable circumstances for a marriage,” Kovacs says.

Another factor that may affect the surviving parents is the nature of the child’s death. Jeanne Murrone, a Charlotte, N.C., clinical psychologist who works in grief-related issues, says that in situations in which children have died after a lengthy illness, parents have had time to adjust to the impending loss. When the child’s suffering has been especially great, death may also bring about a sense of relief.

But sudden deaths from accidents or tragedies like the Oklahoma City bombing, she says, are likely to be harder on parents who, in addition to being wholly unprepared for the child’s death, suffer from the trauma of the event and from guilt from having placed the child in that situation.

“Can you imagine the guilt of the parents who put their children in that day-care center?” Kovacs says. “They will replay endlessly what they would have done differently.”

One dissenting voice on the nature of grief is Andrea Gambill, editor in chief of Bereavement magazine, a publication she calls “a support group in print.” Gambill, who lost her 17-year-old daughter almost 20 years ago, says the notion that divorce follows a death is “absolutely not true” and that in most cases losing a child “will strengthen a marriage . . . in the long run.”

“This is all based on the assumption that a child’s death is a terrible stress on a marriage and therefore it will end up in divorce court,” says Gambill, who says the presumption that a child’s death will trigger divorce is based only on anecdotal experience and not clinical data.

“The investment that each parent had in the child gives them a link they don’t want to end,” she says. Similarly, in cases where one parent may have been in charge of the child at the time of death, Gambill’s experience through the magazine has been that there “is not a lot of blaming.”

“If the blame exists, it is short-lived,” she says. “When two people love each other, they’re very willing to understand how it could have been them in charge.”

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Such understanding, however, is not likely to be forthcoming immediately after a child’s death. Therapists recommend that following a loss, grieving parents should look outside their marriage to friends, religion and family for support and respect the manner in which the other spouse grieves.

In many cases, one or both parents may find it difficult to discuss a child’s death until months or years after the fact. One Northern California woman whose toddler drowned in a bathtub and who was divorced shortly afterward, says she and her husband could never bring themselves to really talk about their son’s death. Decades later, both having remarried, they met each other in public and broke down crying and were for the first time able to communicate their shared pain and loss.

Psychologists say, too, that while most parents learn how to cope with their loss, they rarely are ever able to forget it. Recently, Kovacs began counseling an 82-year-old woman who more than 50 years ago lost her 8-year-old son to leukemia. Although she separated from her husband, they later reconciled. The woman produced a faded photograph of her son, one she always carried in her wallet.

“She wept as bitterly as if it had been yesterday,” Kovacs says.

“A death of a child goes on for the rest of your life,” Rosof says. “To the parents of a dead child, he grows up in their minds every day, like, ‘Today, he’d be starting first grade,’ or ‘Today, he’d be getting his driver’s license.’ Twenty years after, parents will say, ‘I think about him every day.’ ”