For years, Brittney Roberts says she heard the familiar words without fully understanding them: God first. Your spouse second. Your children next.

Like many parents, she once struggled with the idea.

If someone had asked her thirteen years ago whether she would choose her husband or her child, Brittney says her answer would have been immediate.

“My child. Don’t even finish the question.”

At the time, she could not have imagined how deeply life would eventually force her to reconsider those words.

Today, Brittney is an Alabama mother who has buried two of her children.

Thirteen years ago, she and her husband, Jason, said goodbye to their baby girl, Darby Kate. And this year, after an agonizing battle against cancer, they stood together as their son, Will Roberts, took his final breath.

The funerals are now over.

The visitors have gone home.

The flowers will eventually fade.

And the Roberts family is left with the quietest part of grief: learning how to live in a house where someone they love is no longer there.

For Brittney, that silence has brought an understanding she says she never could have gained any other way.

It has changed the way she thinks about marriage, family and the person standing beside you when life becomes unbearable.

During Will’s cancer battle, Brittney and Jason fought desperately to save their son. They searched for treatments, pursued every possible option and held onto hope even when the circumstances became increasingly difficult.

But eventually, there was nothing left to fight.

They had to watch their son die.

And then they had to bury him.

For Brittney, the experience revealed something profound about the role her husband played in her grief.

“When we lost Darby Kate, I needed Jason,” she said. “Thirteen years later, when we stood beside Will and watched him take his last breath, I needed Jason in a way I don’t think I ever knew one person could need another.”

Those words capture something that can be difficult to explain to anyone who has never experienced the loss of a child.

Brittney’s children were never meant to carry their mother through grief.

They were her children.

Jason, however, was walking through the same devastation.

He wasn’t standing outside her pain, trying to understand it.

He was inside it with her.

“We buried a baby together,” Brittney reflected. “We fought like hell trying to save our son together, we stood beside him when there was nothing left we could do together, we buried him together, and now we’re learning how to live without him together.”

That word—together—may be the heart of everything Brittney is trying to say.

Her message is not that a spouse should somehow be loved more than a child.

It is not a competition.

It is not a ranking of which family member matters most.

Instead, she says she has come to understand the order as something different: a foundation for surviving the moments in life when everything else begins to collapse.

“Not an order of who I love the most,” Brittney explained. “An order I finally understand was designed by Someone who already knew what this life could ask us to survive.”

And life has asked the Roberts family to survive more than any parent should have to endure.

They lost Darby Kate.

Then, thirteen years later, they lost Will.

Between those two losses were years of raising a family, making memories and believing they would have many more years together. But cancer changed the future they had imagined for their son.

When Will’s fight finally ended, Brittney and Jason were not only grieving the child they had just lost. They were carrying the memory of another child they had already buried.

That kind of grief does not simply disappear when a funeral ends.

There is no ceremony that teaches a parent how to wake up the next morning and accept an empty bedroom.

There is no final goodbye that makes a photograph hurt less.

And there is no simple explanation for how a family begins again after losing someone who was supposed to grow old alongside them.

Perhaps that is why Brittney’s words about marriage have resonated so deeply.

She is not speaking from a textbook.

She is speaking from two funerals.

She is speaking from the experience of needing someone to hold her up when she no longer knew how to stand.

She is speaking about the person who was there when Darby Kate died, and who remained there when Will’s life came to an end.

She is speaking about Jason.

“Love your spouse,” Brittney urged. “You never know when they are the only thing next to God that can keep you standing and marching forth.”

It is a message born from unimaginable pain, but also from the strength Brittney says she found in the person walking beside her.

There are moments in life when parents naturally place everything into their children. Their schedules, their hopes, their dreams and their futures become intertwined with the lives of the little people they are raising.

But Brittney’s experience has taught her that marriage can become something different when tragedy arrives.

A spouse can become the person who remembers the same child.

The person who knows the same memories.

The person who understands the silence at the dinner table without needing an explanation.

The person who doesn’t need to be told why a certain song suddenly hurts, why a birthday feels impossible or why an empty room can feel louder than anything else.

For Brittney and Jason, grief is now something they must carry together.

They cannot bring Will back.

They cannot undo the loss of Darby Kate.

But they can continue walking forward, carrying the memories of both children with them.

And perhaps that is the lesson Brittney never expected to learn.

Sometimes, the person standing beside you becomes most important not because you love anyone else less, but because they are the one who can walk into the darkest place with you—and refuse to leave.

After everything this family has endured, Brittney and Jason are now learning how to build a life around an absence that will never truly stop hurting.

Their children will always be part of them.

Darby Kate will always be their daughter.

Will will always be their son.

And through the grief, Brittney says she has discovered another truth she hopes others will remember before tragedy ever gives them a reason to understand it:

Love your spouse. Hold onto each other. Because none of us knows what tomorrow may ask us to survive.

As Brittney, Jason, their daughter Charlie and Granny continue learning how to live with the loss of Will and Darby Kate, they are carrying something no parent should ever have to carry.

But they are carrying it together.

And for now, together may be what keeps them standing.