Robby Reider ’03 Channels Grief—and Helps Dads Around the World

Fourteen years after graduating from SSFS, Robby Reider ’03 found himself deeply grieving. He and his wife were eagerly awaiting their first child, Lila, only to lose her to stillbirth. Reeling from painful, complex emotions during the following months and years after their loss—wanting desperately to comfort his wife while navigating his own heartbreak—he found solace in the company of two other dads who shared the very same loss, one of whom happened to be a close college friend. Before long, they decided to grow their support group of three in order to help many more like them.

As Co-Founder and Executive Director of the SAD DADS CLUB, now two years old, Robby oversees a much-needed, close-knit virtual community of thousands of men across the globe who have experienced the loss of a child. In the process, he is helping to transform the notion of masculinity, and providing resources for fathers grieving the death of a child to engage in vital professional mental health services. A passionate musician who toured professionally after college—he has fond memories of working alongside his SSFS 9th grade math teacher Niall Hood to record his first songs—Robby says he has “never felt more determined or motivated” than he does now, at the helm of SAD DADS CLUB. 

Recently, he sat down with us to share his story. Below are edited excerpts, in his own words. 

Losing Lila

I met my wife, Tehilah, at Bowdoin College—she was one year behind me, though we were not romantically involved until after graduation. We married in 2013, and Lila, our firstborn—our daughter—was delivered still on December 13th, 2017. 

Eleven months earlier that same year, my best friend from college, Jay Tansey, also had a stillborn daughter. Up to that point, I had never even heard of a stillbirth. I didn't know what it was. I only knew that miscarriages were common and that they typically occurred within the first trimester. Jay and I were both living in Portland, Maine, with our families and our friend groups, and we were like, any day now, Jay's going to have his second child. When I got the text from him saying they had lost the baby, I literally didn't understand. I remember thinking, did the baby fall? And he was not at the point where he could explain it to me in that moment. Watching him and supporting him as best I could through his grief gave me a front-row seat to understanding how heartbreaking and earth-shattering the experience was for him and his wife.  

So, I always say that—when it happened to Tehilah and me 11 months later—I had the fortunate misfortune of being able to immediately go to someone who understood and who was already almost through the first year of his grief journey. Having Jay, someone that I was already so close to, as a resource and a reference was lifesaving. That might sound dramatic, but it gave me a really necessary outlet that, at the time, I didn't know would be so crucial. 

Connection Through Grief  

Seven months after Tehilah and I lost Lila, we heard from a mutual friend that another Bowdoin classmate—a few years younger than we were—who was living in the Portland area as well, also had a stillborn daughter. Within the span of 18 months, the three of us had stillborn daughters. Friends connected us to her husband, Chris, and asked us if we would be willing to talk to him. We said, of course. And the three of us—Chris, Jay, and I—started spending a lot more time together.  

We immediately recognized how comforting it was to have one another, to have a place where we could unmask. We could either say nothing or say everything, and we didn’t have to explain ourselves either way because we understood one another. Everybody's grief journey and healing journey is different. Both are lifelong and neither is linear. But we had the common bond of navigating life after these earth-shattering losses within our families.  

Building SAD DADS CLUB

It became apparent to us that it was pretty special to have one another. We knew there were probably a ton of guys out there like us who didn’t have anyone. Having gone through our local hospital to find out what sorts of resources were available for bereaved fathers, we knew there was nothing. There is literally no other community-based, peer-to-peer, nonclinical support system for fathers who have lost children, and we thought, what we're doing with each other, I bet we could expand it and help others. 

In March of 2022, we launched our SAD DADS CLUB website and Instagram account. Later, at the suggestion of another loss dad in Los Angeles, we started a private channel on Discord. Almost immediately, dads started reaching out. Some had very recently lost children; others had lost their children years ago. All of them said that they felt alone and were so glad to find this community of other men who were openly talking about their feelings, being vulnerable, and validating one another in their grief.  

Chris, Jay, and I each wrote out our birth stories on the website so people could see what we were about and the way that we were reflecting on and articulating our losses. We invited dads to share their own stories with us and offered to post them, too. It created this ever-growing archive of stories so that if a dad who has lost a child stumbles upon our website, he can find and read something at his own pace that could potentially help him feel less alone. You're in such a fog right after a loss; your executive functioning is out the window. Beyond going to a website and just reading at your leisure, you can't ask much more of someone in those first few weeks and months.  

We make it clear that we do not presume to understand the experience of a dad whose child went to the NICU and never made it home, a dad whose child passed away from SIDS or SUDC [sudden unexplained death], or a dad who lost an older child through an accident or cancer. We are just speaking from our own experiences. I think that by being so deliberate and forthright about our grief, it has allowed the group to become more diverse in terms of the dads who show up and the type of loss they experienced. At its root, Sad Dads is about men's mental health and grief and creating a space where vulnerability is okay.

SAD DADS CLUB has since grown into a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, and we have weekly Thursday-night Zoom sessions that anyone is welcome to join. We get dads from across the country and the world at this point. We also host two retreats a year in Maine, where men can gather in person. It’s important to emphasize that we are not mental health professionals and not equipped to offer professional services; our focus is peer-to-peer support.  

Why Dads?

Understandably so, many support groups are geared towards moms. We really wanted to not only fill this void but redefine the definition of masculinity—this idea of having to be strong, unemotional, or unexpressive, to grin and bear it and keep going. That’s an unrealistic expectation of any human being. 

Especially as fathers, we're made to think that we should always be in control. But when you lose a child, you've completely lost control. It’s scary. When you try to regain that control in other parts of life, you often ignore your feelings. Unless you give them release, they just continue to build. Having a dedicated space like SAD DADS, where you can express yourself and be validated and supported gives you the relief and the recentering to be able to return to other crucial parts of your life where you’re needed, like being attentive to your partner, an older child, or your workplace. 

In our Zoom sessions and on our Discord channels, all sorts of topics arise, like careers after loss, intimacy after loss, and pregnancy after loss [Robby and Tehilah welcomed a son, Dallas, in September 2019]. We also just talk about movies or books or sports. Three different fantasy football leagues were created this year through SAD DADS. There's a group that plays Dungeons and Dragons once or twice a month. There's a book club. All these groups have organically evolved as the men become close and comfortable with one another. They’re finding a way back to the things that they enjoyed in life before the loss, which is hard because you almost feel a little bit guilty experiencing that relief. 

Remembering

When you lose a child, there’s this compounded or secondary loss of the world moving on and forgetting about them. Especially with a loss like a stillbirth, where you don’t even get a chance to know your child, it feels like they can be easily forgotten. No one is talking about them because people often don’t know what to say. That experience can become very complicated and difficult. So, in the SAD DADS community, we have a calendar for birthdays. Every time there’s a birthday, the Discord chat is just lighting up with people messaging a dad birthday wishes. That act of constant remembrance is so meaningful. 

It’s just another way that this community is helping dads. It keeps me motivated, making sure that all of these children and babies who aren't here have a place where they are remembered and no one's squirming or feeling like it’s taboo to talk about them. 

The Future 

In addition to our social media presence, Zoom sessions, and retreats, we are launching a program that will remove the financial and logistical barriers to professional mental health services after a loss. SAD DADS is partnering with therapists who specialize in grief and child loss so that we can send dads to those therapists, and the therapist will then bill SAD DADS CLUB. Within the professional mental health space, it is believed that six sessions with a therapist can equip someone with the tools necessary to cope in healthy ways. SAD DADS CLUB has started sending bereaved fathers to therapists. Based on exit surveys from those dads, we’re confident we'll have data at the end to show that this really is helping, and then be able to fundraise and scale so that we can help any number of dads. 

Removing those logistical and financial barriers is something that Chris, Jay, and I really believe in strongly. The three of us were lucky to have great insurance because we worked for good employers; we had the benefit of being able to access professional mental health services. But we know that there's disparity out there. 

As we look to fundraise and scale so we can help more dads, I don't want to do anything that could compromise the meaning or the authenticity of our community and what we're doing. Maintaining the magic and the sincerity of our work is important to me. I mean, if anybody wants to give us a billion dollars, we'd take it! We could certainly put it to good use. Having a physical space would be cool. We want SAD DADS CLUB to outlive the three of us, to be an available resource for dads forever. 

I've never felt more determined or motivated to meaningfully grow a community of people. This work has been incredibly healing for me. It is not easy. It's emotionally exhausting, but it's also personal and so I take the responsibility seriously of it being something that's working well and doing a lot of good for other dads. But ultimately, it's not about me or any one person. It’s about a community, continually showing up, over and over again, willing to be vulnerable and support one another. 

To read more about Robby’s work with SAD DADS CLUB, check out his interview with Bowdoin Magazine. 

Robby Reider attended Sandy Spring Friends School from 1996-2003. Robby says of his time at SSFS: “I had such an awesome group of teachers and administrators who were incredibly encouraging, and there is no better setting to find yourself in, especially at the ages of 11 through 18.” Some highlights from his years at SSFS include starting a band with friends and recording music with the support of his math teacher, Niall Hood; playing varsity soccer under Spanish teacher and longtime soccer coach Eduardo Polón, who instilled in team members the concept of the strong–and-KIND–“gentleman warrior”; and getting an “A” in Russian Literature, taught by longtime SSFS English teacher (and notoriously-difficult grader!), David Kahn. Robby says that “the emphasis on community and the values of Quakerism resonated deeply” with him as a student, and the ideas instilled at both SSFS and at Bowdoin around the importance of making the world a better place informed his commitment to SAD DADS CLUB.