Dawson’s Creek star James Van Der Beek has revealed his wife has suffered another devastating miscarriage
The couple had a pregnancy loss seven months ago.
At the end of last year, actor James Van Der Beek was a contestant on the US series of Dancing with the Stars when he shared to viewers that his wife Kimberly had suffered a miscarriage.
Seven months on and James is again sharing more heartbreaking news.
The 43-year-old former Dawson’s Creek star took to Instagram to reveal his wife had suffered another miscarriage, 17 weeks into her pregnancy.
“After suffering a brutal, very public miscarriage last November, we were overjoyed to learn we were pregnant,” he began his post.
“This time, we kept the news to ourselves. But last weekend, once again, 17 weeks in… the soul we’d been excited to welcome into the world had lessons for our family that did not include joining us in a living physical body.”
Kimberly, 37, was rushed in an ambulance to the hospital for “another harrowing night of blood transfusions,” he said, thanking the medical professionals who “navigated the maze of regulations to save her life.”
James wrote that he felt “helpless to do much for the woman I loved other than massage her feet and try to keep her warm (with my #DWTS robe, ironically)” but that “something kept running through my head, again and again, which I now feel compelled to share. We’ve got to take better care of each other.”
“The world is in pain right now. There’s denial, shock, numbness, anger – all the old patterns we cling to when deep trauma is unearthed. And there are no words to ease that pain, to make the process hurt less or to solve it quickly. But the way out of it? Starts with an open, broken-hearted contemplation of this question: How can we take better care of each other?”
He concluded: “And to all the families who have gone through this: You are not alone.”
Sadly this is Kimberly’s fifth miscarriage in nine years. James and Kimberly, 37, married in 2010 and have five children together: Olivia, nine, Joshua, eight, Annabel, six, Emilie, four and Gwendolyn, two.
In 2018, after the couple had suffered their third miscarriage, James called for another word to describe a pregnancy loss.
In a heartfelt post to Instagram he wrote: “First off — we need a new word for it. ‘Mis-carriage,’ in an insidious way, suggests fault for the mother — as if she dropped something, or failed to ‘carry.’ From what I’ve learned, in all but the most obvious, extreme cases, it has nothing to do with anything the mother did or didn’t do. So let’s wipe all blame off the table before we even start.”
James with his wife Kimberly and their five children.
With one in four pregnancies ending in miscarriage, sadly too any couples face this loss. One which James describes as a pain that “will tear you open like nothing else.”
“It’s painful and it’s heartbreaking on levels deeper than you may have ever experienced,” he explained.
“So don’t judge your grief, or try to rationalize your way around it. Let it flow in the waves in which it comes, and allow it its rightful space. And then … once you’re able … try to recognize the beauty in how you put yourself back together differently than you were before.”
