Assign top priority to your marriage relationship. Cultivate transparency, openness, and honesty. Accept the pain that you feel. Be willing to share it and to listen to your spouse?s expression of the pain they are feeling. Be patient with your spouse and with yourself. Recongnize that your spouse is probably not at the same place in the grief process as you, and that is okay and very normal. Don?t expect your spouse to be your only source of healing. Keep working at communicating. Give special attention to your affection for each other. Learn and practice the gestures of love. Remember to stay in touch physically; the importance of human touching and hugging is hard to over estimate. Allow yourselves to enjoy life and each other. Be willing to laugh together, as well as to cry together. Work at finding some fun things to do together. Help each other to remember that life is more than this child who has died. As important as this child is to you, as much as you feel pain over his or her death, your marriage relationship involves far more than this child. |
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