Greg Wise has recalled the emotional toll of failed IVF attempts with his wife Emma Thompson as they tried to conceive a second child over many years.
In an account published by the Guardian, Wise describes sitting with Thompson in a doctor's office after receiving news that a cycle had not been successful. He characterizes the experience as a form of grief that often goes unrecognized. "This is a kind of grief that is often not understood even to be grief at all," he writes. "A grief about the loss of a potential child. An anticipatory grief – a grief for something that hasn't yet appeared."
Wise notes that the couple had attempted multiple cycles in the years after the birth of their daughter Gaia. He says they did not seek counselling as a couple during this time and that he had "no knowledge of how to process my grief, compounded month on month."
The rounds of treatment included fertility drugs, ovarian hyperstimulation, injections, scans and blood tests, all of which proved unsuccessful. Wise describes supporting Thompson through the process "wholeheartedly," but says she was "devastated by her inability to conceive again" and blamed herself. He notes that nothing he could say would change her perspective.
Wise emphasizes that grief from failed IVF lacks formal social recognition. There are, he writes, "no set grief rituals for this – for a child never present – no space in our society to mark, to grieve an actual physical death. It is a silent, achingly lonely, atomised grief."
The couple's experience took place over two decades ago, according to Wise's account.