Help Your Marriage Survive: The Death of a Child

This book, written by a research psychologist and based on interviews with couples who lost a child, offers wise advice in everyday language rather than abstract jargon. While there are other useful guides available, they deal with each survivor on an individual basis. However, each parent may have different ways of coping which also procede at different rates. The present book is especially valuable because it focuses on the problems that death of a child might generate between the parents and offers (not imposes) advice to help the couple deal with their mutual loss. Of course, I do not presume to know how this book would affect other parents who lost a child but based on my own personal experience of such a loss, I can attest that it was very constructive positive counsel.

This is my author's view of the book: Many parents who have experienced the death of a child struggle with painful and at times almost overwhelming marital problems. Grieving can create great marital distance, and it can magnity couple problems that existed before the child died. Grieving parents often fear that they will divorce. Most books that have been written to help grieving parents focus on individual, personal grief. This book focusses on the couple relationship. Based on intensive interviews of 29 couples who experienced the death of a child, the book offers perspectives, insights, powerful and moving interview quotes, and advice dealing with common marital problems experienced by bereaved parents. Commonly the problems are connected to couple communication, differences in grieving and how those differences are interpreted, sexuality, parenting of other children, the use of alcohol and drugs, blaming, differences about whether to have another child, differences in whether to go outside the marriage for support, and what to do with things and spaces that were the child's. This book discusses hard realities but offers a message of hope. Grieving parents can and do overcome marital difficulties and achieve a strong and loving marriage based on resepect for differences, mutual understanding, and their shared history.