When my wife and I married, she was nineteen and I was twenty-one. “Young” and “foolish” were used more than once to describe our swift romance. We did not care. We were excited about our life together and especially the prospect of starting a family. Because of medical complications, we had been warned that becoming pregnant might be difficult. Then, after ten months of marriage, my wife’s doctor told us that pregnancy might now be good for her body. Within two months, she was pregnant with our first child. We found out on our one-year anniversary.

Our first son was born without complication. At least that is my memory, though my wife remembers more of it. Several more children followed quickly. By the time our oldest was five, we had four—three boys and a girl. My wife hoped our daughter might have a little sister. While I was in seminary, she became pregnant with our fifth child. At about ten weeks, she began to experience spotting and pain. Then she miscarried.

It was a sadness we had not known before. Four healthy pregnancies had made us forget how fragile our expectations could be. What was harder is that life did not stop to make room for grief. There were still four children to feed, teach, and put to bed. I still had to work and study. Yet sorrow had entered our home in a profound way.

My wife wondered whether her earlier medical problems had returned. My grief took another form. We had argued a few days before the miscarriage, and I quietly wondered whether I had caused it. I carried that fear for years before finally telling her. She assured me that I had not caused the loss. Medical guidance also makes clear that ordinary stress and arguments do not cause miscarriage.¹ Still, guilt does not always listen quickly to reason.

This experience taught me that while miscarriage is common, it is never commonplace for the husband and wife who lose their child. Common does not mean “small.” A child was anticipated, loved, prayed for, and already given a place in the family’s future. Then, suddenly, that future was gone.

The Temptation to Put Your Head Down

Many husbands respond to trouble by putting their heads down and pushing through. I learned this as a boy when my parents owned a car that sometimes stalled in intersections. It was difficult and embarrassing, but there was only one thing to do: Get out and push. That instinct can be useful. After a miscarriage, someone must call the doctor, care for the children, notify family, and answer questions. A husband may find relief in having something concrete to do.

The danger is that he may turn the entire loss into a series of tasks. He manages the crisis but never enters the grief. He works longer hours, finds projects around the house, or occupies his mind with anything that keeps him from remembering. Meanwhile, his wife may feel that she has lost both her child and, for a time, her husband.

The biblical pattern is not withdrawal from but movement toward the one who suffers. A husband is called to love his wife “as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Eph 5:25). He is to nourish and cherish her as his own body (Eph 5:28–30) and to live with her “in an understanding way” (1 Pet 3:7). This is the heart of the husband’s shepherding responsibility: not control but attentive, sacrificial care.²

A husband will not always know what his wife needs. Living with her in an understanding way does not mean reading her mind. It means paying attention, asking, listening, and adjusting. She may need quiet. She may need to speak repeatedly about what happened. She may want to keep a sonogram, name the child, or mark the date. The husband cannot fix her grief. His first call is simpler and harder: to remain near her. He can say, “I am here. I miss our child too. You do not have to carry this alone.”

Grieve Together Though Not Identically

A husband and wife have lost the same child, but they have not experienced the loss in precisely the same way. The mother has carried the child within her body. She may endure pain, bleeding, medical treatment, hormonal changes, and the physical emptiness that follows. The husband’s grief may be less visible, but it is not unreal. He may feel helpless because he cannot take away his wife’s pain. He may feel guilty that his own body continues as before. He may be angry, numb, or afraid that another pregnancy will end the same way. He may also feel pressure to be strong for everyone else.

Temperament matters. Some women process sorrow quietly, while some men need to speak. Some husbands feel the loss immediately; others begin to feel it weeks later. Neither spouse should make his or her manner of grieving the standard for the other. There is no roadmap for grief that we can easily follow with a planned exit.

The husband should share his sorrow with his wife. She needs to know that he loved the child and feels the loss as well. Yet he should not place the entire weight of his grief on her so that she must become his caretaker while she is recovering. A pastor, elder, or trusted Christian brother may help him speak honestly so that he does not have to ask his wife to bear everything.

It must be said that Scripture does not treat sorrow as a failure of faith. There are too many Christians who expect that the life of the believer is to be a constant joy. But “the Lord is near to the brokenhearted” (Ps 34:18). Our Savior was “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief” (Isa 53:3). He did not stand outside human sorrow. He entered it and wept in the presence of death. When Paul says that believers do not grieve “as others do who have no hope” (1 Thess 4:13), he does not forbid tears. Hope changes our sorrow; it does not erase it.

Refuse the Search for Blame

Miscarriage often produces a painful search for an explanation. A wife may wonder whether her body failed her child. A husband may replay an argument, a trip, or some moment when he was not as tender as he should have been. Both may silently wonder whether God is punishing them. These are questions to discuss, perhaps with a pastor, and matters to pray about together, knowing that our God is good. One way I have counseled couples is to think about how they might answer a friend with those questions. We are usually much kinder and more comforting to others in their grief and frustrations than we are to ourselves.

There may be medical questions to discuss with a physician, especially after repeated losses. But many miscarriages do not yield a clear explanation, and ordinary activities, stress, or marital arguments are not their cause.³ A husband should resist both blaming his wife and allowing her to blame herself. He must also refuse imagined guilt within his own heart.

Confession is appropriate where there has been actual sin. A husband who was harsh should confess his harshness. But neither spouse should transform ordinary failures into a secret explanation of God’s providence. We are responsible for the sins God reveals, not for causes we invent. The sovereignty of God gives solid ground beneath our feet, but it does not give us access to his hidden counsel. To say that God is sovereign is not to say we know why he has ordered this sorrow.

The husband, therefore, should not offer thin explanations: “Everything happens for a reason,” or, “God must have needed another angel.” The first can sound as though we know the reason; the second is not biblical. Better words are humbler and firmer: “I do not know why this happened. I know that our Father has not abandoned us. I know that he is good. I know that Christ has entered death and overcome it.”

God’s goodness is revealed supremely at the cross. “He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all” will not cease to be faithful to those whom he has redeemed (Rom 8:32). Dark providence does not make God dark. His character has not changed.

Shepherd Her in Ordinary Ways

A husband’s care after miscarriage will usually be expressed in ordinary actions. Shepherding may mean accompanying his wife to appointments, listening to medical instructions, keeping track of medications, and taking responsibility for meals, laundry, children, and communication with others. He may need to protect his wife from well-intended but intrusive questions. He can tell family and church members what may be shared and what should remain private. He should not assume, however, that silence is always best. Some wives are wounded when the child is never mentioned again. Ask her what she wants others to know.

He should remember that physical recovery and grief do not follow the same timetable. The expected due date may be especially difficult. So may Mother’s Day, a later pregnancy announcement, or the birth of another child in the family or church. A wise husband remembers these moments and moves toward his wife before she must ask.

He should also be patient concerning physical intimacy. Miscarriage involves bodily recovery and emotional vulnerability. Loving leadership never demands that a wife resume normal life according to the husband’s preferred schedule. Christlike love subordinates personal convenience and desire for the good of the beloved.⁴

Prayer may be brief. A husband does not need to produce a theological lecture beside the bed. He can read one psalm, thank God for the life of the child, confess confusion, ask for healing, and plead for grace to endure the next day. When he has few words, he may simply pray, “Lord, have mercy on us. Keep us near to you and near to one another.”

The Hope That Death Cannot Take

The hardest question remains: What hope do Christian parents have for the child who has died?

David’s words after the death of his infant son have comforted generations of grieving parents: “I shall go to him, but he will not return to me” (2 Sam 12:23). We should not force the verse to answer every question, but neither should we overlook the posture of covenant faith from which David speaks. He rises, worships, and entrusts his child to God.

Christian hope does not rest on the supposed innocence of infants, as though anyone were saved apart from Christ. It rests on the mercy of God in Christ. The Westminster Confession expresses this carefully: “Elect infants, dying in infancy, are regenerated and saved by Christ through the Spirit, who worketh when, and where, and how he pleaseth.”⁵ God is not limited by the ordinary means through which he often brings older children and adults to conscious faith.

We do not claim knowledge of the secret decree. We entrust our children to the Judge of all the earth, who always does what is right (Gen 18:25). We remember his covenant promise to be God to his people and to their children. We remember the tenderness of Christ toward little children. Salvation belongs to the Lord. Above all, we remember the resurrection. The sorrow of this life is not answered merely by learning to cope. It is answered by Jesus Christ, who died and rose again. The grave is real, but it is not final. Death separates, but Christ gathers. The bodies of believers rest in their graves, still united to Christ until the resurrection.⁶

A grieving husband is not his wife’s savior. He cannot explain the providence, remove every fear, or call their child back from death. He is an undershepherd in the home, also in need of the Good Shepherd. Yet he can remain. He can listen. He can weep. He can carry what burdens he is able to carry. He can confess his sorrow and refuse false guilt. He can pray when neither of them knows what to say.

Most of all, he can keep pointing, gently and patiently, to the only comfort that belongs to Christians in life and in death: that we are not our own, but belong—body and soul—to our faithful Savior Jesus Christ. The empty place in the family will remain part of its story. It need not become a wall between husband and wife. By grace, it may become a place where they learn to grieve together, bear one another’s burdens, and wait together for the day when Christ will wipe away every tear and death shall be no more.

Notes

1. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), “Early Pregnancy Loss,” patient FAQ. ACOG notes that stress and arguments do not cause miscarriage.
2. This understanding of the husband’s role is developed more fully in Everett A. Henes, “A Husband’s Call: The Husband as Shepherd,” unpublished paper. The paper emphasizes leadership expressed through caring, protecting, providing, nurturing, nourishing, and cherishing.
3. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, “Early Pregnancy Loss,” Frequently Asked Questions; Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, “Pregnancy Loss (Before 20 Weeks of Pregnancy.” Both sources note that a cause often cannot be identified.
4. Francis Foulkes, Ephesians: An Introduction and Commentary, Tyndale New Testament Commentaries 10 (InterVarsity Press, 1989), 163.
5. Westminster Confession of Faith 10.3.
6. Westminster Shorter Catechism 37.

©Everett Henes. All Rights Reserved.

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Post authored by:

• Everett Henes

  

  Everett Henes (MDiv, ThM, DMin) is pastor of Hillsdale Orthodox Presbyterian Church, where he has served since 2008. He is husband to Kimberly and father of five children and grandfather of five (and counting!). He teaches US History and Philosophy of History for Jackson College in Michigan. He is currently working towards a PhD in Humanities with a focus in US Religious History from Faulkner University. In his spare time, he enjoys competing in powerlifting and strongman and teaching homeschoolers Taekwondo.

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