By Mallory Mattingly
Former country singer Granger Smith and his wife Amber made an “unromantic” pact that saved their marriage following the tragic death of their 3-year-old son.
“I think we recognized early that most couples don’t make it,” Granger said on “The Jinger & Jeremy Podcast” of what happens to many marriages after a child’s death. “I don’t know the statistic, but it’s over 50 percent. It usually leads to divorce, something like that.”
River died in 2019 in a drowning accident, “despite doctor’s best efforts” to save his life, his parents said at the time.
“We were out in this serenity garden and just, kind of, in the aftermath of organ donation and, you know, friends and family and, like, [realizing] River is not going to come back, and all of this,” Granger recalled. “We just did this really unromantic, ‘Hey, let’s just shake on this. Let’s promise each other we’re going to stay together. We’re not going to be a statistic in this.'”
Related: Granger Smith Leaves Music Industry to Focus on Ministry
Amber remembered what Granger said after the tragedy.
“‘We have to try to find the good, not the reasons. We have to try to find the good in this and we can’t let anything tear us apart,'” she recalled him saying.
However, Granger felt it was harder for Amber to keep her end of the deal because he was with River when the accident occurred.
“Anytime I talk about that, though, I always say your end was much harder to uphold than my end because I was in the backyard with Riv, you weren’t,” he explained. “And so you, at any time, could have said in your lowest moment, ‘Babe, how could you have done this? Where were you? How did you let this happen?'”
“Never did you do that, not once. Not even in your lowest, weakest moment did you snap at me and say, ‘You caused this.’ You never did, and that could have completely broken me,” he added.
She pointed to the “grace of God” for not snapping at her husband.
“I didn’t ever feel that. By the grace of God, we were both home at the same time — which we weren’t ever usually home,” Amber said. “He was gone or I was gone. We experienced that together, and God gave us the gift of going through that together.”
“I felt, as we’re both performing CPR on our son, we are both fighting for our son here. This is our son, this is our marriage,” continued Amber. “I felt guilt that I didn’t put River to bed earlier, I should have taken the boys inside. There’s all kinds of parenting guilt that we both feel.”
The tragedy sent Granger into a spiral, and he almost committed suicide, but God stepped in.
“By the sheer grace of God, Granger became aware that the voice quietly telling him to pull the trigger wasn’t his own,” Amber said previously. “He realized suddenly that he was under attack. He was engulfed in spiritual warfare.”
Granger has since given up his country music career, pursuing pastoral ministry instead.
Though such a tragedy could have pulled the Smiths apart, God used it to strengthen their marriage and reliance on Him.
Read Next: Granger Smith Reflects on How Suffering Draws Us ‘Nearer to God’
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