Granger Smith and his wife, Amber Smith, made a vow to stay together after the tragic death of their 3-year-old son.
“I think we recognized early that most couples don’t make it,” Granger, 46, said on the Wednesday, May 6, episode of the “Jinger and Jeremy” podcast. “I don’t know the statistic, but it’s over 50 percent. … It usually leads to divorce, something like that.”
Granger and Amber, 44, announced in June 2019 that River died in a “tragic accident.”
As doctors attempted to perform life-saving measures on the toddler, Granger revealed that he and Amber made a “pact” not to break up amid their shared grief.
“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 on Wednesday’s episode. “We just did this really unromantic, ‘Hey, let’s just shake on this, like, let’s promise each other we’re going to stay together. We’re not going to be a statistic in this.’”
Amber, for her part, noted that the country singer initiated the conversation.
“I think you said, ‘Babe, we have to find the good in this,’” Amber said. “‘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.’”
As for Granger, he believes it is presumably more difficult for Amber to keep her word.
“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 said. “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.”
According to Amber, she never snapped at her spouse “by the grace of God.”
“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,” she stated. “He was gone or I was gone [and] 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, like, ‘We are both fighting for our son here. This is our son, this is our marriage.’”
Amber continued, “I felt guilt that I didn’t put River to bed earlier, I should have taken the boys inside [and] there’s all kinds of parenting guilt that we both feel. How dare I put any sort of blame on you? … And so, we made that kind of pact and just said, ‘Nothing’s going to tear us apart. We’re going to choose each other every day.’”
Both Granger and Amber understood that their journey would get “really hard,” but they were committed to staying strong as a family unit for their other kids. (Granger and Amber also share London, 14, Lincoln, 12, and Maverick, 4, the latter who was born two years after River’s death.)
“We both grieved very differently, but I think so often people give up and they just think about their own selves in their marriage and we made a pact,” Amber said on Wednesday. “We made a promise, a vow, a covenant before the Lord that we were going to be in it for better or for worse, and I always say that was the worst part of our story, so we’ve just chosen each other.”
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