The night before Rob Reider lost his daughter, he had a dream. He rarely remembers his dreams. But he remembered this one.
“In that dream, I was cradling my arms like this, and there was a newborn baby. And I was trying to hold the baby, adjusting my body, but the baby was floating and I couldn’t get the baby into my arms. And I believe in retrospect, and in that moment, that was when Lila died.”
The pregnancy had been normal, zero red flags. Then one Wednesday morning at 38 weeks, there was no heartbeat. The floor didn’t drop, Rob says. It disappeared. It vanished from beneath them.
Rob told me this around a fire in the woods behind my parents’ house. He is the co-founder of Sad Dads Club, a nonprofit providing support and community for fathers who have lost a child.
Grief Has to Go Somewhere
Grieving is part of being human. So, it should be simple to say that a father who loses a child needs somewhere to put that grief. But when Rob and two friends started looking, there was nothing for them. Plenty of support for mothers, which makes sense, and almost nothing for dads.
“There is not an exclusive space other than Sad Dads Club for dads where they can come together with like-minded fathers who have been through something similar.”
That absence is not harmless. Grief doesn’t evaporate because a man was never given a place to feel it. It waits. And it comes out somewhere, usually sideways. We see it in the numbers. Men die by suicide at four times the rate of women. We talk about deaths of despair, about men in crisis, about anger and violence that seem to come from nowhere. I believe a lot of it is grief and trauma that was never allowed a door.
So, this isn’t only about grieving fathers, as much as they deserve the care. It’s about what happens to everyone downstream when a whole half of the population is handed no way to carry their pain.
The One Emotion Men Are Allowed
Rob has a theory about why the anger shows up, and it starts with how boys are raised.
“It’s synonymous for men to just like all the anecdotes of be tough, suck it up, grin it and bear it.”
The only feeling the culture reliably permits a man is anger. So, a grieving father, with no room to be sad, defaults to the one door left open.
Rob doesn’t think that road leads anywhere good.
“What’s that going to do for you if you’re trying to repress and shove down all this stuff that’s just going to then erode you from the inside?”
Here is the part that stays with me. When Rob finally built a room where grief was allowed, the anger that supposedly defines men mostly didn’t show up. Guys arrive braced for it.
“We don’t see a lot of anger. We see a lot of openness. We see a lot of compassion. We see a lot of vulnerability.”
Men who came in with no intention of speaking find themselves compelled to, not obligated, just moved, after hearing another father say his child’s name out loud.
I don’t think that anger is the truth of men. It is just what leaks out of a box with no other culturally accepted exit.
A Net to Catch You
Sad Dads Club exists because Rob got lucky in the worst way. Eleven months before he lost Lila, one of his closest friends from college had lost a daughter the same way. Eight months after Lila, the two of them met a third father who had also lost a daughter. Three men who could say everything or nothing at all and never had to explain themselves.
“I had the fortunate misfortune of having someone close to me, both emotionally close and physically. So, I had a net to catch me before I fell.”
Then they realized most men fall with no net at all. So, they built one. On a cold, rainy night when the three of them were getting together in person for the first time, Rob’s wife had joked that they’d be sitting in the dark drinking beer like a sad dads club. The name stuck, and in March 2022 it became real.
What they offer isn’t a fix. Rob is careful to say nothing makes the grief disappear. What they offer is a witness. He borrows the phrase from Dr. Kathy Shear, who founded the Center for Prolonged Grief at Columbia University.
“Grief needs a witness. We have an audience of people who are not going to be uncomfortable. They’re not going to be curling their toes waiting for you to finish telling this story. They’re actually listening eagerly and they’re taking it all in and they are there for you.”
And once a man is witnessed, his relationship with the grief can change. Rob told me about a father in the group, an avid runner, who couldn’t put his shoes on after his son died. Another dad said he’d had the same struggle, until he decided that when he ran, that would be his time to talk to his child. That flipped a switch. Now running is how the first dad stays close to his son. The grief didn’t leave. It found a better shape.
What It Asks of the Rest of Us
Near the end, I asked Rob what fires we need to tend. He said:
“Why can’t we do the emotional equivalent of holding the door for one another and just assuming that internally we are all on crutches of some sort, whether that be with compassion, grace, patience, respect, just kindness.”
His answer wasn’t directly about grief. It was about the fact that we all carry things internally. You’d hold a door for someone on crutches without a second thought. So do the emotional version of that for each other. The person who cut you off, snapped at you, seems set on ruining your day, might just be carrying the loss of a child or grandchild. What if we all gave each other that grace?
He left me with one more thing, for anyone who has ever frozen up in front of a grieving friend and said nothing because they were afraid of saying the wrong thing.
“It’s okay not to know what to say. It’s not okay to say nothing.”
Ask about their child. Say their name. Even if they can’t go there in that moment, they will remember that you cared enough to ask. What is more likely to build resentment is the silence.
Why This Conversation Matters
Heart-Strong is about the boxes fear builds, and the work of stepping out of them. Some boxes are prison walls. Some are childhood conditioning. And some are the quiet rules a boy absorbs before he can talk, like the rule that says his grief is not welcome here.
Rob and the fathers of Sad Dads Club are climbing out of that box in real time. Not by getting softer. By getting whole. And when a grieving man finally has a place to be whole, the rest of us are safer, closer, and more human for it.
If someone comes to mind who might need this, a father, a friend, someone carrying something alone, pass it along to them. Because the stories we share around the fire have always been how we change and grow together.
Learn more about Sad Dads Club at saddadsclub.org.
This Substack is a production of Heart-Strong, a nonprofit centered around a simple belief. The world works better, for everyone and everything in it, when more of us are pulled by love than controlled by fear. Our work is focused on making love cool again. And we know we can’t do it alone. We have an open invite for anyone curious about what that world could look like. Learn more at www.heart-strong.org.
