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Greg Wise on how he and Emma Thompson coped with failed IVF: ‘We hit an existential crisis – she was not a proper woman and I was not a proper man’

Their hopes of having a second child were dashed. Two decades on, the actor remembers the grief and pain of that time

“I’m afraid this cycle has not been successful.” Emma and I cannot catch each other’s eye. We sit mute in our grief in the silence of the IVF doctor’s office. This is a kind of grief that is often not understood even to be grief at all. A grief about the loss of a potential child. An anticipatory grief – a grief for something that hasn’t yet appeared – a mourning for a possibility, of a longed-for future life to welcome, love and nurture. And there are 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. We had undergone many attempts in the years after the birth of our daughter Gaia. But that did not make this any easier.

Each cycle, each time we sat in that office, we had to ignore our grief and concentrate wholeheartedly and positively on our next attempt. We didn’t access any help over this time. We didn’t seek out counselling as a couple. I had no knowledge of how to process my grief – compounded month on month. Further cycles, more drugs, more fertility hormones, more ovarian hyperstimulation, injections, scans, blood tests came and went, all proving unsuccessful. I supported all wholeheartedly, but Emma was devastated by her inability to conceive again. In her mind, she had failed and could not forgive herself for that failure. And nothing I could say would change her point of view.