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 years after the birth of our daughter Gaia. But that did not make this any easier.

Each cycle, each time we sat in that office, we had to ignore our grief and concentrate wholeheartedly and positively on our next attempt. We didn’t access any help over this time. We didn’t seek out counselling as a couple. I had no knowledge of how to process my grief, compounded month on month. Further cycles, more drugs, more fertility hormones, more ovarian hyperstimulation, injections, scans, blood tests came and went, all proving unsuccessful. I supported all wholeheartedly, but Emma was devastated by her inability to conceive again. In her mind, she had failed and could not forgive herself for that failure. And nothing I could say would change her point of view.

Her deep grief took her away. I had to deny mine. Try to comfort her rather than myself. Such is the lot of the self-appointed saviour.

E mma and I had met seven years before on the set of the film Sense and Sensibility. She had adapted Jane Austen’s novel, and was playing Elinor Dashwood; I was John Willoughby, a “caped Adonis” on an enormous white horse, galloping in and scooping up her injured and prone sister Marianne, delivering her back home. As I leave the scene, the hero of the hour, the saviour of potential catastrophe, in a swirl of cape and the heady musk of testosterone: “His manly beauty and more than common gracefulness were instantly the theme of general admiration.” The problem was, this was how I had always seen myself in real life.

Emma and I came together in the unreal space that is a film set. They are very seductive spaces, film sets. Protected spaces, as we are all outside our natural, everyday lives. And it was here that my roles as saviour in the film and as saviour in life collided.

I galloped in, on my big white horse, scooped her up, and saved her.

Emma’s husband had moved out of their home just before the filming started. She was in profound grief at the apparent ending of their marriage. But she also held a chronic grief. Her father, Eric Thompson, the writer and narrator of the cult television programme The Magic Roundabout, had suffered his first heart attack when Emma was eight. He had had a severe stroke 10 years later, which left him semi-paralysed, and she took it upon herself to help this extraordinarily skilled lover of language to speak again. He died when she was 23.

She had already lost her wonderful uncle, her mother, Phyllida’s, brother James. He had been in a catastrophic car crash in his early life, and had never fully recovered. He suffered a brain haemorrhage when Emma was in her late teens. She was the only family member present to make the decision to turn off his life support, before she walked back home, alone, with a bin bag filled with his clothes. Within a few short years of her father’s death, she also lost the other vital male figure in her life, her godfather.

Filming finished, we hid ourselves in my little two-up, two-down house in north London. Both of us bringing along our overstuffed suitcase of grief, bulging with recent and age-old unresolved pains.

This was the first shape that was created. We bonded in our grief, Emma’s present grief at the end of her marriage, my anticipatory grief that she might nonetheless try to revivify it, grief at the possibility of the death of this relationship, so soon, with so much recent love and so much future promise.

Then everything exploded when the tabloid press found us out and we had to escape. And created a new shape, the fugitives.

We went to work in Los Angeles, rented a house there, filmed projects, lived a fun life up in the hills, with a pool, a convertible sports car. Our shape now of a hopeful, creative, unfettered, adventurous, outward-looking, energised couple. But this shape could not last. We had to reshape ourselves to the realities of our lives. And Emma now divorced, we decided it was time to come back home. After three years together, it was time to settle. It was, we decided, time to start a family.

We were unable to conceive. And Emma was fast approaching 40.

T he simple fact of us not being able to get pregnant was momentous. It is one of those major marking points, the end of one way of looking at life, as it is a death, in a way, a death of a possibility, a death of a new shape that had been expected, and brought both a profound grief and a deep sense of shame in its wake. A shame borne by both me and Emma, as we saw ourselves as unable to fulfil our purest and most natural role in life, to procreate. We hit an existential crisis, it’s a given, all the stories we had read as children, telling us that girls grow up to become mothers; boys, fathers, Emma was, therefore, not a proper woman and I was not a proper man.

Even without knowing the root of our problem, I was gnawed at by the sense of being emasculated. The confusion of my fertility somehow being aligned to my manliness, virility and sexual potency. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had somehow failed as a man, with the simple fact that I had spun in my head, infertility equals impotence.

We both undertook tests to see where the problem lay. The problem lay with Emma. We would never be able to conceive naturally. IVF was the only option if we wanted to have a child of our own.

It is absolutely extraordinary that IVF treatment exists. Extraordinary, but also brutal. And oddly, within a process that hopefully results in the creation of a human, it can feel utterly dehumanising. It is purely a clinical process and easy to become totally overwhelmed with every aspect: decision-making, appointments, injection schedules, scans, where to get the treatment, how many embryos to transfer.

We knew we were so fortunate to be able to afford to undertake the process, but we didn’t know that embarking on IVF opens up a potential minefield of grief, a constant swinging between hope and despair within each cycle of the treatment. It was physically gruelling for Emma. She was exhausted, in pain, filled with chemicals, her hormones all over the place, overstimulated while at the same time having to try to remain resolutely calm.

And all I could do was support her; within this treatment, all my capacity for any sense of agency was almost nonexistent. My job in its clinical entirety was purely to provide some sperm. That was it. I just had to do a quick sprint; she was on the marathon.

And I couldn’t fix this. I couldn’t make things better or make this work. This was so hard for me to confront, I couldn’t be the saviour now. I just had to try to be strong, protecting Emma as best I could, trying to lighten the load as much as I could. But this was her gig, not mine.

Our very first attempt at IVF resulted in a positive pregnancy test just days before her 40th birthday. Four weeks before we welcomed in the new millennium, we celebrated the arrival of our beautiful, healthy baby daughter Gaia, whom we’d first seen at four-cells old. Our shape had changed once more: we were now awestruck, doting parents.

In Gaia’s second year of life, we started another IVF cycle. And failed. Repeatedly.

T hat day in the doctor’s office, we decided to stop. The most difficult decision we had yet had to make. No result, nothing tangible, it just stopped. It had failed. Rationally, it was the only decision we could have come to, emotionally, it was untenable. We were dislocated, isolated in our overwhelming grief. I now know we were slipping into complicated grief.

Even though there can be no set timescale for processing, the myriad of feelings within the grief can expand themselves into our void of loss and become a chronic problem. This grief can consume our lives.

The precision of the grief, the focus of the loss, muddies and seeps out and, over time, if not addressed, metamorphoses into major depression. This is where it took us, an overbearing blanket of sadness covering the two of us. And we both felt so alone; we couldn’t address it as a couple, we didn’t seek help together.

This complicated grief, given the medical moniker prolonged grief disorder, now classed as an official mental health disorder, hits about one in 10 of us powerless to come to terms with our loss half a year on. A helplessness, inability to accept, disbelief, numbness. Grief is natural, grief is healthy, grief is essential in the process of being able to adjust to where we find ourself after a loss, but it can become a clinical problem, it can disrupt our life so fully that we can’t find a way out. And it can be made even more toxic if guilt and shame are in the mix.

I had never been a more grief-sodden mess, feeling myself, months after we had finally made the decision, falling into a black depression. I had totally hit the bottom and could not navigate myself out of the darkness I found myself in. There was nothing I could do. Other than to ask for help.

I have always been a bit of a northern man about getting medical help. I am terrifically accident-prone. From a childhood spent falling out of trees to being a grownup with a collection of madly dangerous power tools, I have often wandered back to the house with blood streaming, large bone-showing holes, but refusing to seek out a medical professional. I have a certain amount of shame attached to my self-inflicted injuries; that the medics would view me as they would a child with a saucepan wedged on their head, humorous, a bit pathetic, but mainly just idiotic.

I viewed therapy in the same way. A neurotic American fixation, an ego-fuelled unnecessary waste of time and money, and something to be sneered at. Our lot in life was to deny, obfuscate and just bloody well get on with it. This was my belief.

Then I moved in with Emma. She had started her therapy before we got together, and would wander off down the street to see her Jungian therapist weekly. After a while, I started to perceive this as a threat. I’d heard stories of a partner getting therapy and then breaking up the relationship, that it involved laying the blame for the couple’s ills on the other partner. The fact that I thought this illustrates the fear and pain that were my constant companions.

I was told many years later that you finally go into therapy when you realise that the pain you are carrying is greater than the pain of exploring it. And therapy is painful, without doubt. It is painful because you are exposing things that have been living in the very core of your being for perhaps your entire lifetime, and often these things don’t give themselves up without a fight.

But I knew I was in pain. I knew that I needed professional help. Starting it was the best decision I have ever made.

I began my journey in a little upstairs room in central London. The first thing that confused me was that I wasn’t lying down, the pose adopted in all the films I’d watched. The second thing was that, six sessions in, the only one seeming to be doing any talking was me. I couldn’t see any therapy happening whatsoever. It was gently pointed out to me that nothing could be discussed until my story had unfolded enough to be looked at.

I brought shame with me into the room. It wrapped around me, muffled me. Shame brings muteness. I needed to articulate what had up till now never been articulated. That was one of the most difficult aspects of this, telling my history, as honestly and personally as possible.

But a large part of my shame was that I didn’t seem to be doing this properly. I would start to try to unpack with, “I think …” and be told, “I would really like to know what you feel …”

I didn’t know what I felt. Apart from feeling I wanted to stop coming to therapy. That I was being made to feel ashamed by the process.

Even though everyone’s grief is unique to them, there are clear patterns to where it sits, whether in feeling or thought. I approached my grief in a cerebral way, as I had been brought up to do: think my way through.

I was grieving the way the majority of men grieve. I had my dad as my original guide to what being a man looked like; I had my single-sex school, bringing along with it how boys should behave and what kinds of men they should become; I ventured out into my adult life as Man the Saviour, the protector, the provider of safety and security, setting aside my wants for the sake of the other, emotionally restrained, self-controlled.

This is what I brought into the therapy. What it is to be a man, independent, not showing vulnerability, strong, stoic. All these traits, given to me to wear like an ill-fitting jacket, made this type of therapy almost impossible for me. I was thoughtful, active, a problem-solver, but I was being asked to be open, expressive, available emotionally.