Despite the nerves, I felt at ease the moment Beth appeared in her Zoom chamber. It was an interview for both of us; she was assessing me as much as I was assessing her and yet something about the conversation felt unusually open. After more than three years of knowing each other, and nine months of living under the same roof, I can confidently say that we both sensed something unfolding.

Beth was the most refreshingly honest and vulnerable person I had ever met. She didn’t seem to hide anything from me - a stranger with whom she shared no culture, nationality or generation. Among the many things she revealed in that first call was that she had lost her third child years earlier and that she believed her daughter’s passing had given her a chance to live more honestly.

When I later told my parents about the woman whose family I was considering moving in with, I said I wasn’t sure how most people would interpret Beth’s words. I imagined she had received judgement for saying that her newborn’s death had become a wake-up call. “People often don’t listen to what someone is actually saying,” my dad said. “I understand Beth. She did exactly what death asks of the living, but what many don’t have the strength to do. “

I have a complicated relationship with the word strength, especially when it’s used to divide people into “weak” and “strong”. But I understood what my dad meant: death asks the living to search for light once their eyes have adjusted to the dark.

Beth and Sam hadn’t simply survived devastation. They had chosen life afterwards. Not the life they had before, not the life they expected, but a life rebuilt with intention.

More than ten years ago now, a really close friend of my dad’s lost her 25-year-old son. In the span of a month, she went from the shock of a diagnosis to burying him. About a year later, she divorced her husband, realising that it was only their child that had kept her in an unhappy marriage.

Theirs was one of those marriages whose cracks loss only reveals; it doesn’t create them. Only 4% out of the 16% of couples who divorce after child loss cite the event as the main reason; the other 12% consider it simply the trigger, the straw that broke the camel’s back.

She entirely deconstructed and repurposed her life to serve her joy and to honour what her son would have wanted for her. What struck me the most was not her resilience and vitality, but her family’s repulsion to her joy.

They were all grieving, determined that such a devastation in the roots of the family could only allow them to survive and never thrive again, while she, the mother, the womb, had chosen to continue searching for meaning: in buying a new car, in moving out of the city, in finding happiness with another partner, in dedicating her life to her garden.

It was staggering to witness how the people who loved her intentionally tried to inflict their unbearable pain on her. Blinded by the light she was refusing to extinguish in her, they didn’t seem to understand that she could co-exist and even co-thrive with sorrow as her companion. Her perseverance and the certainty that there was an existence to be restored is what prevented my dad’s friend from succumbing to judgement.

Until they filmed the first episode of Biting Lemons, I had heard Beth and Sam speak about Florie many times, although I didn’t know the full story of her passing. But living with them, I witnessed their grace, tenderness, resilience and their deeply human understanding of death, one that sits beyond religion or culture.

I saw how they communicated, honest, gentle, curious. Even when they disagreed, a harsh word never left their mouths. Criticism was coated in respect, as if they were constantly reminding each other that everything came from love and a desire to understand the other’s inner world.

Their communication was something to be studied: a daily dose of Vitamin C for the immune system of a relationship. I imagine it played a massive role in how they survived their daughter’s death, together.

When we choose a partner, we list the qualities that make them a good fit. We imagine “better or worse”, but we rarely dare to consider the true meaning of worse. We don’t ask: Is this someone I could trust to walk through the devastation of child loss at the same pace as me and come out the other side still by my side?

Child loss is one of the strongest predictors of marital strain. Couples who survive often share open communication, shared meaning- and purpose-making, acceptance of different grieving styles and commitment to life beyond grief.

In the first episode of BL, Beth and Sam share that they wanted to be able to say, “This is shit. This is hard,” but many people around them seemed unable to let Florie simply pass.

Beth needed to lay her daughter to rest, breathe, collect the pieces and grieve. In Option B, Sheryl Sandberg writes that the Golden Rule (“treat others as you want to be treated”) doesn’t apply to grief. Instead, she suggests the Platinum Rule: “Treat others as they want to be treated.” It is easy to offer what we think someone needs. It is much harder to listen for what they actually ask for.

This is the foundation of understanding grieving styles, just like love languages, except a love language is often more predictable and can expand upon a kind request from a partner, while a grieving style may take longer to change shapes and is rarely malleable upon request.

Not every griever wants cotton cushions of metaphors or reassurance. Beth wanted acceptance, the space to let Florie be part of her identity and motherhood, without her having to convince herself that Florie was somewhere waiting for her.

Sam felt similarly. He noticed how hard people found it to address Florie’s death, even while offering practical support. The person who made him feel most seen was his former employer, who had lost a child herself. She held the balance he needed: dry humour, cynicism, genuine love and the courage to ask the questions others avoided.

He also had Beth and she had him.

Like infertility stories, if a couple places all their meaning-making on a child, life becomes fragile. Parents with shared interests and mutual understanding also often find it easier to stay connected after the nest empties, because meaning-making rests on both personal and shared identity.

Back in the 90s, psychologists Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun coined the term ‘post-traumatic growth’, which implies “the experience of positive change that occurs as a result of the struggle with highly challenging life crises”.

“It is manifested in a variety of ways, including an increased appreciation for life in general, more meaningful interpersonal relationships, an increased sense of personal strength, changed priorities and a richer existential and spiritual life,” they write.

Positive psychology is helpful until it’s not. Applied too early, it risks invalidating pain and sweeping away the essential, often ugly work of grieving. But post‑traumatic growth, when understood correctly, doesn’t deny trauma - it grows from it. The trauma must first be integrated, given a seat in one’s life, before any upward movement becomes possible.

Unfortunately, nobody knows how long it would take them to come to the surface after a plunge so close to the bottom. They cannot warn their partner and ask: “Hey, same time next year?” hoping to meet them where they are in their grieving as well. What matters is not whether they align in pace, number of days where washing their hair is impossible, lack of appetite or size of the waves of crushing sadness.

What matters is whether they agree to wash their partner’s hair when they have more energy for the trivialities of daily life and vice versa. The idea is to look in the same direction, to a future that honours what was lost and holds just enough imagination to choose to rebuild.