Granger Smith and his wife, Amber Smiththey vowed to live together after the tragic death of their three-year-old son.
“I think we saw early on that a lot of couples don’t work out,” Granger, 46, said on the Wednesday, May 6, episode of “Jinger and Jeremy.” a podcast. “I don’t know the numbers, but it’s more than 50 percent. … It usually leads to divorce, something like that.”
Granger and Amber, 44, announced in June 2019 that River died in a “catastrophic accident.”
As doctors tried to save the child’s life, Granger revealed that she and Amber made a “covenant” not to be separated in the midst of their grief.
“We were out in this garden of peace and, just, after organ donation and, you know, friends and family, and, like, [realizing] River’s not coming back, and all of this,” Granger recalled in Wednesday’s episode. “We just did this really unloved, ‘Hey, let’s shake it up this time, like, let’s promise to stay together. We’re not going to be a statistic this time.’”
Amber, on the other hand, noted that the country singer was the one who initiated the conversation.
“I think he said, ‘Dad, we’ve got to get the best out of this,'” Amber said. “‘We must try to find the good, not the reasons. We must try to find the good in this and we will not let anything separate us.’
As for Granger, she believes that it is very difficult for Amber to keep her word.
“Whenever I talk about that, I always say that your ending was more difficult to represent than my ending because I was in the backyard with Riv, you weren’t there,” she said. “And, you, at any time, could say in your lowest moment, ‘Father, how could you do this? Where have you been? You never did that, not once – even in your lowest moment, your weakness did not insult me and say, ‘You caused this.’ You didn’t, and that would have broken me completely.”
According to Amber, she has never eaten her spouse “by the grace of God.”
“I didn’t hear that. By the grace of God, we were both at home at the same time – which we rarely were at home,” he said. “He was gone even after I left [and] we saw that together, and God gave us the gift of going through that together. I heard, as we were both doing CPR on our son, like, ‘We’re both fighting for our son here. This is our son, this is our marriage.’”
Amber continued, “I felt guilty that I didn’t put Mfula to bed earlier, I should have put the boys in the house.” [and] there are all kinds of parenting guilt that we both feel. Dare I blame you? … So, we made that kind of deal and we just said, ‘There’s nothing that’s going to separate us. We will choose each other every day.’”
Granger Smith’s wife, Amber Smith, describes the moment she learned the former singer was struggling with suicide after the death of their son River, 3, in her new memoir, The Girl on the Bathroom Floor. “My sweet, wonderful husband, wonderful father of my children, put a cold Glock 9mm in his mouth. I’m crying […]
Both Granger and Amber understood that their journey was going to be “really hard,” but they were committed to staying strong as a family unit for their other children. (Granger and Amber and share (London, 14, Lincoln, 12, and Maverick, 4, the latter born two years after River’s death.)
“We both cried in very different ways, but I think most of the time people stop and think about themselves in their marriage and we make a deal,” Amber said on Wednesday. “We made a promise, an oath, an agreement in front of Jehovah that we will be there for good and bad, and I always say that made our story worse, so we just choose each other.
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