You expect grief to be hard. You expect the missing and the crying and the days that knock you sideways. You expect the anniversary dates and the empty chairs and the moments that ambush you in the cereal aisle at the grocery store.
What you do not expect is what grief does to the space between you and the person you love most.
There are a lot of life situations that can birth grief. Not just the loss of children — though that is part of our story — but the other kinds too. The job that disappears. The parent you say goodbye to too soon. The parenting seasons that bring you to your knees. The emotional and hormonal shifts that change you in ways you did not see coming. The losses that do not come with a sympathy card but cost just as much.
And in every one of those seasons — grief does something to a marriage that you may not see coming.
We talked. But neither of us knew how
In the early days we did not go quiet. We tried to talk. We were committed to not shutting each other out — and I am grateful for that. But talking and knowing how to talk are two different things.
Part of the problem was that we did not always know what we were feeling. Grief is not one emotion. It is a hundred of them — sometimes in the same afternoon. Sadness and anger and relief and guilt and love and loneliness and gratitude all tangled together in a way that defies description. You cannot tell your spouse what you need when you do not know what you are feeling. And you cannot name what you are feeling when you have never felt anything quite like it before.
We had the conversations. We just did not always have the language. We did not know how to say I need you to sit with me in this or I need you to give me space right now or I am not angry at you — I am just drowning and you are the safest person to drown near.
So sometimes what came out was not what we meant. And sometimes what we heard was not what was said.
Grief does that. It takes the clearest communicators and turns them into people who cannot find the words. Because the words that exist do not quite fit what you are carrying.
We grieved differently. And sometimes that felt like distance
He processed one way. I processed another. In different seasons — sometimes he went quiet when I needed to talk. Sometimes he moved forward when I needed to stay still. Sometimes he expressed it through work or projects or activity while I was still sitting in the feeling of it.
None of that was wrong. It was just different.
But different — when you are already depleted, already raw, already running on empty — can feel like alone. Even when you are in the same room. Even when you are both trying.
It is the quiet cost of grieving alongside someone you love. The way grief can make you feel lonely inside your own marriage — not because your spouse is not there, but because you are both so deep in your own version of it that the gap between you feels wider than it is.
And in that gap — the enemy of your marriage is not your spouse. It is not the person across from you who is grieving differently or needs something you cannot give right now. The real enemy — and I mean that literally — uses exactly this moment… the feeling of being alone and misunderstood inside your own marriage — to keep you stunned, silent, and hurting. To convince you that the distance is permanent. That the gap means something it does not mean. That you are more alone than you actually are.
You are not. And they are not your enemy.
We took turns struggling
This is the thing I have come to understand — slowly, over time — about grieving alongside someone you love.
You will not always be in the same place at the same time. And that is not a failure. That is actually — if you let it be — a gift.
There were seasons when he was struggling and I was okay. And I could be the steady one. The one who showed up. The one who held the space while he found his footing again.
And there were seasons when I was the one who was not okay. When the grief came back in a new form or the hard season pressed in harder than expected. And he was there. Steady. Present. Holding the space while I found mine.
We did not plan it that way. We could not have. But looking back — I can see that God was doing something in the rhythm of it. Making sure that when one of us went under the other one could reach down and hold on.
That is not something you can manufacture. It is something you receive — with gratitude — when you realize it is happening.
We could not do it alone
There came a point when we realized that what we were carrying was bigger than what we could work through just the two of us. We needed someone outside the marriage to help us see what we could not see from inside it. Someone trained to help us find the language we were missing.
I wrote about my own journey of finally asking for help— and what I found when I did. Getting that help was not an admission of failure. It was one of the bravest things we did for our marriage.
If you are in a season where the gap between you and your spouse feels wider than you know how to close — please hear this: asking for help is not giving up. It is choosing each other hard enough to do the uncomfortable thing.
What held us together
It was not one thing. It was never one thing.
It was communication — learning slowly and imperfectly to say the true thing instead of the safe thing.
It was patience — giving each other room to grieve at a different pace without making that difference mean something it did not mean.
It was community — the people around us who showed up, who stayed, who reminded us that we were not alone in it.
It was faith — the quiet, stubborn conviction that the God who brought us together was not finished with us yet. That He was present in the gap between us even when we could not feel Him there. That He could hold what we could not hold for each other.
And it was time. More time than we expected. More grace than we thought we had. More choosing each other — imperfectly, repeatedly, on the hard days as much as the easy ones — than either of us knew we were capable of.
If your marriage is in a hard season right now
Whether it is grief or loss or something else entirely — a job, a diagnosis, a child who is breaking your heart, a season that has gone on longer than you prayed —
You are not failing your marriage by struggling.
You are not failing each other by grieving differently.
You are not too far gone to find your way back to each other.
And you do not have to figure it out alone.
The gap between you — however wide it feels right now — is not the end of the story. It is the middle of it. And middles are hard. But middles are also where the work happens. Where the growth happens. Where you discover what you are actually made of — individually and together.
Keep choosing each other. Even when it is hard. Especially when it is hard.
Because God is not finished with your story — and your marriage is part of that story.
If you are in a hard season right now — the free Prayer List includes prayers for spouse and your marriage. And if you want to go deeper — the Old to New Creations Journals were designed for exactly this kind of slow, intentional work.