Granger Smith and his wife, Amber Smith, pledged to remain together following the devastating loss of their 3-year-old son.
“I think we recognized early that most couples don’t make it,” Granger, 46, stated 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 their son River died in a “tragic accident.”
As doctors worked to save the toddler, Granger shared that he and Amber made a “pact” to stay together through their shared grief.
Former country music singer Granger Smith and his wife, Amber Smith, discuss the death of their son River Kelly in 2019. He was 3 years old. While appearing on the Tuesday, September 19, episode of Tamron Hall, the couple reflected on the guilt they felt after River’s drowning accident. “I was processing it […]
“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.’”
Granger believes it was likely more challenging for Amber to uphold her promise.
“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.”
Amber attributed her restraint to “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.’”
Granger Smith’s wife, Amber Smith, shares the moment she learned the former country singer struggled with suicidal ideation after their 3-year-old son River’s death in her new memoir, The Girl on the Bathroom Floor. “My sweet, incredible husband, the wonderful father of my kids, put a cold Glock 9mm into his mouth. I cry […]
Granger and Amber acknowledged that their journey would be “really hard,” but they remained committed to staying strong for their other children. (Granger and Amber also share London, 14, Lincoln, 12, and Maverick, 4, 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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