Dads Facing Grief and Loss
“Men don’t share, men don't open up, that’s kind of the expectation. It’s not until you realize you really need the help, and you get to experience the safe space [in the bereaved dads’ group] that you decide, Oh yeah, it's okay for us to feel and grieve and start working through what we have to work through.” – Josh Betancourt
John Bandeian, III currently lives in Holyoke with his partner Dorothy and their three living children. He is a private practice Trust and Estates attorney and works out of his home. When he’s not working, he spends most of his time with his partner and kids. They have three 90-pound puppies (Great Pyrenees, Newfoundland, standard poodle mix). After the loss of their daughter Niyari Hope Bandeian on April 15, 2021 (yes, Tax Day is even worse now) at twenty weeks, he has devoted a great deal of his spare energy to the Empty Arms dads’ group, which he helps facilitate with another loss dad on the third Wednesday of each month on Zoom.
Joshua Betancourt is a hardworking father of two who loves cars, good food, and nerding out about Pokémon with his son.
Alex Vispoli is a sports broadcaster originally from Andover, Massachusetts. He spent a decade broadcasting Minor League Baseball all across the country before moving back to the Bay State to work in local college sports. He has been the TV broadcaster for Harvard football for the last 8 years, has anchored Red Sox radio broadcasts, and has experience calling a wide variety of sports. Alex and his brilliant, beautiful wife are avid hikers and have climbed all 48 of New Hampshire’s 4,000-foot mountains. They are proud parents of three children — two in Heaven and one here on Earth. Alex hopes that sharing his experience as a bereaved father can help other dads as they make their way through the pain and loneliness of their grief journeys.
This blog is made possible by a sponsorship from Sage Therapeutics, Inc. and Biogen Inc. All content on this page has been curated by the Mass. PPD Fund without input from Sage Therapeutics, Inc. or Biogen Inc.
June 2025 | Interviewed and edited by Jessie Colbert, Executive Director, Mass. PPD Fund
This Father’s Day, the Mass. PPD Fund is honored to feature three dads for whom Pregnancy and Infant Loss is part of their fatherhood journey. John Bandeian, Josh Betancourt, and Alex Vispoli each had the tragic experience of losing babies, and found solidarity and support through Empty Arms Bereavement Support. Dedicated to their families, they each speak to the challenge of grieving babies when you are expected to be “the rock,” both to their wives and the world at large. Empty Arms’ dads’ groups gave them the space to open up about the pain of their losses, and they encourage other dads who’ve been through the same experience not to be afraid to reach out and find support.
Let’s start with your stories. Can you each share what happened with your babies?
John Bandeian: I live out here in Holyoke with my wife, Dot, and we have three living kids. We got pregnant during the pandemic, everything was going well. We’re older, my wife was in “geriatric” pregnancy at the ripe old age of 36. She went in to get the genetic testing done, and the baby was fine, there were no issues.
But [three days later] we had our 20-week ultrasound, or as one of the fathers in our group calls it, the anomaly scan. My wife went to the hospital – I had not gone to the hospital, I’d been there for all the other pregnancies, but I couldn’t go because it was during COVID. I get this phone call, she’s very upset and I know instantly that something's not good. And a nurse or a doctor got on and explained to me that there was no heartbeat. They’re like, You need to get down here.
They told us our options, and my wife really wanted to do the delivery. They put us way over on the other side of the hospital. There’s nobody around, and the lights are all dim, and I noticed the sign on the door with a leaf hanging over a water droplet. I was like, This has got to be their protocol to tell you something bad's happening. I was kind of in a daze, I was trying to manage my wife’s feelings and my own shock. She delivered our baby girl, Niyari, which is Armenian for river. It was a whole lot of trauma, and I was mostly in damage control.
One of the nurses said something about Empty Arms, I think she had a brochure. My wife and I wouldn’t normally reach out to a strange group, but for whatever reason we called. Carol [Empty Arms’ Founder and Executive Director Carol McMurrich] came out in the snowstorm, and helped us do the handprints and the footprints, and she arranged for a photographer to come, and for the cremation and all that stuff. My wife stayed in the hospital for three days, and I went home every night. I had to take care of our kids and explain to them what's going on based on their age and limited understanding.
After we got out of the hospital, we went to a couple group sessions with Empty Arms, but they were more geared towards the mothers. I was just in survival mode. My wife had terrible postpartum depression. I was keeping the three kids alive, trying to keep the house going, trying to keep work going, and COVID was happening. It was just an absolute disaster. I started getting really anxious and disgruntled, for lack of a better word, which is not really my jam. I called up my therapist and he said, You should see if there's a group to talk to.
It turns out I hit it right on stride for [a new] dads’ group. I did not want to go – I talked myself in and out of it up to the last second when I signed on Zoom. And I found my home, I found a place where a lot of people got what I was [experiencing]. We really got to know each other, and a lot of us felt like this was the first time we got to talk about stuff. And then Carol tapped myself and another dad to see if we'd run it as co-facilitators. Then most recently, we got to help the Vermont Empty Arms start their dads’ group chapter.
Alex Vispoli: My wife and I found out she was pregnant in October of 2022, and it was about a month after that that we went in for our first ultrasound. My wife is a physician, but I’m not somebody who'd seen a lot of ultrasounds, and I said, Either there's some sort of mirror effect, or that's two. We found out we were pregnant with twins, that we were having a little girl and a little boy. We were just so thrilled and excited. My wife was a lot more nervous than I was, because she's been trained to know all of the things that can go wrong, and pretty much every twin pregnancy is considered high risk. We had been told by doctors that we were at the lowest end of that [risk], everything looked good.
We didn't like the way they termed the twins – one is lower than the other one, and the medical term is the “superior” twin and the “inferior” twin. We’re big hikers, and there's a North Twin and South Twin Mountain up in the White Mountains in New Hampshire, so we called them North Twin and South Twin. North Twin was our little boy, and South Twin was our little girl.
Just before 23 weeks, it was a Friday and my wife was texting me, I feel a little bit of weird pressure. I said, Just call the OB so you're not worrying about this all weekend. We got an appointment for later that afternoon, and we had an ultrasound. Everything looked great. But the OB did an exam and saw that my wife was a centimeter dilated. She had a sudden look of panic on her face and said, Well, this changes everything, we need to get you to the hospital, you're going into labor. So I drove my wife to Winchester hospital. At that point, she was two centimeters dilated, and they don't have a neonatal unit at Winchester, so they put my wife in an ambulance and took her to Beth Israel.
We got to the hospital and they put her on a medicine to do their best to slow labor. What was explained to me is that at their gestational age, they would have about a 10% chance of survival and a drastically lower chance of thrival. Our goal was to try and get to 24 weeks, because at that point it's closer to an 80% survival rate. Unfortunately, as Sunday went into Monday my wife's water broke for our South Twin. It was probably the most terrifying night of my life. We were given a lot of really terrible choices, and our goal of waiting things out was becoming unrealistic. We made the decision that we would lean against aggressive medical intervention, because it would be very unlikely to work, it would be very painful for the babies, and we would not get to hold them while they lived.
That Tuesday evening at 10:44, we delivered our baby girl. We named her Aurora after the Northern Lights, which we had been able to see the summer before in Alaska, because they were beautiful but fleeting and shy, just like [she had been in her ultrasounds]. Then our baby boy was born at 12:30 AM. We named him Orion, after my favorite constellation that's seemingly always visible on a winter night — Orion never had a problem presenting everything that doctors needed to see in his ultrasounds. Our twins, who always seemed to have a playful nature while in their mom's womb, played a little prank on us by having different birthdays.
After they were born, my wife and I were both able to hold them. We wanted to make sure the only things they knew in their lives were love and happiness, so we told them about their family, how their mom and dad met, and how much we loved them. I took a couple of pictures with my phone, and the nurse in the hospital was able to do the same; we treasure those pictures. We listened to their very faint heartbeats, and we know that Aurora waited until she was with her little brother before leaving us.
They passed away in our arms just before 3 AM. We never heard their voices or got to see them open their eyes. The hardest thing in the world was saying goodbye to them, it really felt like our whole world had collapsed.
We were given a bunch of information, and among it was something about Empty Arms. A few months later, my wife was concerned that I wasn't looking after me as much as I was looking after her, and she said, Well, they're talking about starting up a new dads’ group, which day do you want to go? Maybe I still don't really know how to take care of myself through all of this. But I have found the support groups very helpful.
Joshua Betancourt: For us, [baby] Luna’s pregnancy was definitely a roller coaster. I think it was around the 18-week mark my wife Rosa started getting high blood pressure, which led to constant struggles with medication. Then she got hospitalized because her blood pressure spiked to 180. I remember them saying if it spikes out of control again, they have no choice [to terminate because] my wife’s life would be at risk. The rest of the pregnancy was always kind of on pins and needles.
But Luna was healthy, there were no issues. We made a plan to do an induction at about 37 weeks, and they tried the initial medicine to soften the cervix. Luna didn't like it, so they stopped. They started the Pitocin, and she just never really progressed. Some point in the second day, they made a plan that if by tomorrow Rosa hadn’t progressed enough, they're just going to do a C-section. But on the third day in the afternoon, they decided we're going to keep going [with the Pitocin]. The Pitocin was at a red level on the [monitor], but you trust the doctors.
She did fully dilate, but she was in a lot of pain and her epidural ended up running out. I don’t remember how long she was pushing for, but I know that she asked for a C-section at least a couple times. It got to a point where they lost track of Luna’s heartbeat. Shortly after that, it’s a code white, and we're being shipped from the labor delivery room down to do the emergency C-section.
They got Rosa into the operating room, and I'm just standing there waiting outside. I only wanted to hear a cry. I ended up pacing for probably 20, 30 minutes, just hoping for anything. Eventually getting updates that they got the baby out, the baby's not doing too well, NICU staff’s coming by. I remember the first time I saw Luna, she was purple as they rolled her by.
Luna was only alive for 12 hours. I got to visit her three times. The last time was in the morning. The NICU doctors let us know that her heart rate was dropping, and we had the option of continuing to let them do what they were going to do to try to help her, or we could take this opportunity to have some time with her while she was still alive. And we decided on the latter. They unhooked her up from everything and we spent time holding her, kissing her, talking to her, got her baptized, until she passed away.
In the midst of things, one of the nurses shared that Empty Arms was the organization that could be a support. They helped pull us through, from figuring out how to set up a funeral, [to connecting] us with support groups. They helped me with the paperwork because part of my challenge was that my parental leave policy only counts if your baby's still alive. I did a handful of the dads’ group meetings, I did a handful of therapy sessions. I stepped away as I thought I was [feeling okay]. A year later, I might be at a point where I need some level of support again.
Can you reflect on the ways the grief journey has been different for you as a dad than for your wife? How has it been the same?
John: Both parents expected to bring home a baby, and all the hopes and dreams you have for that baby, that's the mutual pain of this experience. But dads don't have the same biological response. I know my wife blamed herself, even though there was literally nothing she could have done. I think that's fairly common.
I think for a lot of the dads, it's six months after loss when they come to the group – that's roughly the amount of time it takes the mom to fully physically recover. [I was] keeping the fort, [I was] keeping the train moving. We were doing zoom preschool and Zoom kindergarten, and then I had a two-year-old that I was trying to keep from choking on stuff. And then my work, and she was out on leave, and we had to fight the insurance company because [they acted like] she was faking the loss somehow. It’s keeping up the grocery shopping, the housekeeping, keeping the bills paid, you're just surviving. And then you wear yourself out.
I didn't realize at first that my frustration and anger, a lot of it was the depression and sadness of losing the child. I just thought it was from being overworked. When I realized there's something else, that's kind of how I stumbled into the Empty Arms and therapy.
Josh: Generally, the father figure is the fixer, we need to solve problems and keep moving forward. And there's no way to fill the void that's created from losing our child. My wife and I use dark humor that the multiverse exists, and we're just stuck on the really crappy path where you get to live life without a child. The other hard part is that internally, you still have that timeline – the milestones, holidays, birthdays come by. You know something's off, and you might not even be thinking about why, and then you [realize], Yeah, this would be Luna's birthday.
Men don’t share, men don't open up, that’s kind of the expectation. It’s probably part of why men don't go to the groups, because they haven't had that kind of safe space before. It’s not until you realize you really need the help, and you get to experience the safe space that you decide, Oh yeah, it's okay for us to feel and grieve and start working through what we have to work through.
Alex: You feel like you're there to take care of your partner and at the expense of yourself sometimes. It’s my job, as grim as it sounds, to keep my wife alive. Especially from the mother's side, there's a lot of self-blame and feelings like, this is not the way that this should have gone. And there's no answer. With my wife being a physician, I couldn't come at her with any sort of medical thing because she knows way more about it than me, and undoubtedly tortured herself by reading every single study that was related to our situation.
It's a generalization that guys are not as open with sharing their feelings, and that's probably the case for me. I would try to not cry around her, I would find times in private where I would let it out. We have to feel like we're the rock.
You’re getting a lot of nods, Alex. Even though things are improving, it seems like pregnancy and infant loss is still not talked about very much. What else do you wish that people understood better about your experience?
Alex: As painful as this was, we like talking about our children. I like it when I'm asked about them, or someone says their name because it validates that they were here. I think sometimes people are afraid to bring up our dead children, they think that that's going to be ripping off a scab. I'm thinking about them every day, even if I'm not talking about them. I've already gone through the most painful thing imaginable. You don't need to walk on eggshells, because nothing will be worse than what I've already gone through.
John: It costs you nothing to put a Google reminder in your phone and reach out to those people on that birthday, on Father’s Day. You can make someone's whole day.
One of the things that amaze me the most is how many people I find out have had loss and never said a word about it. I've talked to 50-year-old, 60-year-old, even 70-year-old guys who were like, It still hurts that we lost our baby back in the 80s. It’s a secret that everybody knows, and once you experience it, it really changes your perspective.
Josh: Yeah, we'll never forget our children, so don’t make us feel like they've been forgotten.
What would you all say to another dad who, tragically, faces this experience in the future?
Alex: There’s validation in the feelings that you're feeling. If you allow yourself to be surrounded by other people who have gone through something [like you have], you might find that there is a lot of comfort in that sort of community, that you can be honest with others and yourself with how it is affecting you.
John: There are a lot more resources available to us as dads than there were 20 years ago, because now people believe men have feelings, and that we don't have to bottle it up. Guys in Grief, they have an amazing podcast. Instagram has Sad Dads Club, which is daily affirmations and posts, it’s excellent. And there's a lot of groups kind of like ours. Having the brotherhood, having people you can talk to and not have to put up any kind of facades or masks is super helpful. Reach out if you’re up for it.
Josh: Nothing can explain away what you're feeling and fill the hole that you have in you right now. But understand you're not alone, you just have to be open to asking for help, as hard as it may be.