John Legend is opening up about his experience with loss and grief two years after he and his wife Chrissy Teigen lost their baby through a traumatic miscarriage.
In September 2020, Teigen shared a series of black-and-white photos of the couple in a hospital bed, chronicling the painful journey they went through in efforts to try and save their baby, Jack.
Legend, who shares daughters Luna, 6, and Miles, 4, with Teigen, recalls that opening up about the miscarriage publicly was a way to help other parents going through similar trauma to know they were not alone.
“It was raw, sharing our experience,” Legend told The Guardian of that time. “I was worried but our instinct was to do it because people knew we were pregnant and Chrissy felt like she needed to tell the story completely about what happened.”
“I was amazed by the outpouring of love and support we felt,” he said of the aftermath. “Also, we found out how many other families have gone through this. It was a powerful and brave thing that Chrissy did to share that because it made so many people feel like they were seen and that they weren’t alone.”
Legend acknowledged that while the experience was a “tragedy,” it also “strengthened our resolve and our resilience because we were there for each other. We came out even more sure of who we were as a couple and as a family.”
The singer is gearing up for a 24-night Las Vegas residency and preparing for the release of his eighth album later his year. Several tracks on the album were inspired by some of the darkest moments in his life — including the miscarriage.
“There’s music dealing with grief and what it feels like to mourn, and to try to pick up the pieces after you’ve lost something,” he said. “When you lose a pregnancy and you have to go through that grief together, it can be really difficult for a family. Hopefully creating music out of it can be healing for me and for other people too.”
Teigen has also spoken about how sharing her miscarriage publicly helped her become a “better person.”
“It seems like so long ago,” she said on the Ellen DeGeneres Show in September 2021. “Of course, everything was such a blur and thinking back to it now, I’m still in therapy about it and I’m still coming to terms with it in a way.”
Before the miscarriage, Teigen had announced her pregnancy in Legend’s music video for the song “Wild.” The tragedy would happen mere weeks later. “In a way, [Jack] really saved me because I don’t think that I would have discovered therapy and then sobriety and this path of really feeling good about myself and feeling like a new person,” she told Ellen.
In the 2020 post announcing her miscarriage, Teigen explained that doctors were unable to stop the bleeding and give Jack the fluids he needed, despite “bags and bags of blood transfusions.”
“It just wasn’t enough,” she said in the emotional post. “We never decide on our babies’ names until the last possible moment after they’re born, just before we leave the hospital. But we, for some reason, had started to call this little guy in my belly Jack. So he will always be Jack to us. Jack worked so hard to be a part of our little family, and he will be, forever.”
The post continued: “To our Jack — I’m so sorry that the first few moments of your life were met with so many complications, that we couldn’t give you the home you needed to survive. We will always love you.”
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