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 year

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