Why Divorce Can Be Harder Than Death
Experiences walking beside both types of mourners
To the men who have just joined Men's Peer Groups, welcome. Some of you arrived carrying a divorce, fresh or years old. I won't tell you anything you don't already know in your bones. I want to confirm it, so you know you aren't crazy and you aren't alone. And to the rest of our community, read this to understand what the man beside you in group may be carrying.
Over the past quarter century I have officiated more than five hundred funerals and written a book on grief. I have also walked beside many men through divorce. Having sat with both kinds of mourners, I can tell you divorce is often the harder road.
A Word That Doesn't Tell the Truth
Divorce is a terrible word. It comes from the Latin divertere, to turn aside. Deuteronomy calls the bill of divorce a sefer keritut, a scroll of cutting off. The language promises a clean severance, yet nothing gets cut. She is still at school pickup and still on the custody calendar. She's still here, but she's not. She is moving on, and you may not be.
Death is devastating in its finality, and I would never suggest otherwise. But I have also walked beside families denied that finality, whose loved one's body was never found or whose questions about the cause were never answered. That gray changes the nature of grief, because there is nowhere to set it down. Divorce, in the vast majority of cases, is that gray by definition. There is no shiva or wake for a marriage.
Everything a Man Can Lose
Often he never saw it coming. Women initiate nearly 70 percent of divorces, and many of the men I sit with were blindsided. Then the losses come, one after another:
His identity, dissolved by a filing.
His kids, reduced to every other weekend and sometimes denied entirely.
His friends, as communities divide and he ends up on the outside.
His reputation, as the story gets told without him in the room.
His freedom, when the police are called and claims are made before a single fact is tested.
His dignity, asking permission to see his own son.
His wages, one paycheck stretched across two households.
That explains the numbers. A 2026 review of 75 studies covering more than 100 million men found that divorced men have nearly three times the odds of dying by suicide as married men. Men who are separated but not yet divorced face nearly twice the risk of those whose divorces are final. The gray is where men die. Divorce is also linked to a roughly sixfold jump in a man's risk of alcohol use disorder, and about four in five custodial parents are mothers. The 13 Minutes Mission exists because a man in this country dies by suicide roughly every thirteen minutes, and divorce concentrates those numbers.
Through the Process and Beyond It
That is why we at Men's Peer Groups are proud to partner with Jude Sandvall, the Divorced Dadvocate. Jude walks men through the divorce process itself, especially the dangerous stretch between court dates where a man's reactivity can cost him his place in his children's lives. And Jude doesn't tell men how to feel. A man in divorce is already being told who he is by lawyers and judges, and what he needs is someone in his corner. Watch the conversation.
When the ink dries, the lawyers move on and a man is often left alone in the quiet. If you have just joined us, you have found your landing pad. Here, men never tell another man what to do. You sit with men who don't need you to be fine, and you tell the truth. Jude doesn't tell a man how to feel, and we don't tell him what to do. Both trust that a man in honest company can find his own way through.
The Courage to Keep Standing
To those who haven't been through it, consider what it takes for that man to walk into the room. He may have spent the morning in a courtroom and the afternoon pretending to be fine at work. Still he shows up and says what is true. That is vulnerability, and vulnerability of that kind is courage. My teacher and mentor, Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist who survived the Nazi death camps and founded logotherapy, taught that when we can no longer change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves. A man who keeps standing in the gray is living that teaching.
We must stand up, and we must hold each other up. For the man in it, that means showing up when everything in him wants to disappear. For the rest of us, it means listening without fixing and staying when it gets heavy. Bring the six questions of The Guy in the Glass into the circle, and let your brothers meet the guy staring back from the glass, especially now, when he barely recognizes himself.
Ram Dass said it best. We're all just walking each other home.
