One study found that 80 percent of couples divorce after they lose a child. The outliers to that statistic were my parents, who almost seemed to fall back in love after the loss of their daughter. “Do you know how much you have changed?” Mom once asked Dad while they were watching the news after a day in court. She meant since he’d been sober, self-exiled in Oregon, and was now the man she wished she could have leaned on when they were married.
