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I've often likened the effect of grief on a marriage to a train going over a wooden bridge. If the bridge was fractured to begin with, the weight and trauma of the train will likely cause it to crumble. And even if the bridge is strong, the train running over it will reveal areas of weakness that need to be shored up.

Fortunately, David and I were given the gift of a strong marriage before grief "ran over" us. Not perfect. Not free of difficult issues or disappointment. But good, intimate, fun, solid. Yet it was tested when our daughter, Hope, and then our son Gabriel, were born with a rare metabolic disorder called Zellweger Syndrome. Their lives were extremely difficult and short.

David and I spent a week at the hospital while Hope was undergoing tests to confirm or rule out the Zellweger diagnosis. During those days one of the nurses brought me A Mother's Grief Observed by Rebecca Faber, a book of reflections from a mom whose child had drowned. I read it voraciously, thinking, This is what's ahead for me.

I came to a chapter where she described the toll the grief was taking on her marriage. She resented that her husband didn't seem as sad as she was and that he'd gone back to work. He seemed just to be moving on. And a chasm was developing between them. But then she discovered that every day on the way to work he pulled to the side of the road to weep. She realized it wasn't that he wasn't grieving, but that his grief was taking its own form, its own time, and wasn't something he felt comfortable releasing with her.

I read that chapter to David. "We'll have to remember this," I told him. "It might be this way for us too."

So even as Hope's life began, long before the intense grief following her death, we were prepared that our grief would likely take different paths, and that those paths could lead us apart if we let them.

While I have no "three easy ways" to hold a marriage together in the midst of unbearable sorrow, I will share what helped us.

As much as we were able to put our awkward feelings and creeping fears into words to each other, we did. But what proved more helpful than just talking to each other was the talking we did with other people. We worked through our thoughts, feelings, fears, theology, questions, and concerns in the process of talking about what we were going through across the table, over the phone, or sitting around the living room with people.

Many people who experience a devastating loss or difficult illness go home and hide. We welcomed the world in.

I suppose it was intimidating for many of these people. They weren't sure what to say or do and wondered if they were imposing on our privacy. But the process of talking about what we were going through—not just medical details but the spiritual questions, emotional issues, relational challenges—not only proved therapeutic, it helped bond David and me in our convictions and concerns. Sometimes we learned what the other was thinking or feeling not by saying it to each other but in the process of overhearing it shared with someone else.

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