21 Weeks: A Father's Grief, Love, and the Memories That Never Were by Ben Johnson

Country artist Ben Johnson shares the story behind his song “21 Weeks,” written after the loss of his baby, and reflects on fatherhood, grief, and the love that remains.

Our Story

My wife and I went into our 19-week appointment expecting one of those moments you remember for the rest of your life for all the right reasons.

We were supposed to find out whether our baby was a boy or a girl. We had already started imagining the life ahead of us — the room, the milestones, the ordinary little moments you don’t realize you’re already attached to until suddenly they’re gone.

Instead, during that appointment, we learned that we had lost our baby.

There isn’t really a way to prepare yourself for the distance between the life you thought you were walking into that morning and the life you’re walking back out into afterward.

You don’t only lose a pregnancy. You lose an entire future you had already started living in your head.

For me, that was one of the hardest parts to understand. I was grieving someone I had never gotten to meet, while at the same time grieving everything I thought I was going to get to experience with them.

I had already imagined teaching them things. Picking them up when they fell. Getting a call someday because their car broke down. Helping them move. Watching them grow up. Maybe one day watching them get married. I could imagine all of the little, seemingly meaningless conversations we might have had, but I would never get the opportunity to have them.

Those memories never happened, but somehow losing them still felt real.

Experiencing Loss as a Father

One of the things I’ve come to understand is that fathers can sometimes feel a little invisible in pregnancy loss.

And I understand why.

My wife physically carried our baby. She experienced things that I never could, and watching the person you love go through that kind of pain creates its own kind of helplessness.

As a husband, a lot of my instinct was to be strong for her.

You want to take care of your wife. You want to hold things together. You want to make sure she knows she isn’t alone.

But at the same time, you’re grieving too.

I don’t think men always know what to do with that.

There can be this feeling that your job is to support everyone else before you acknowledge what happened inside you. And sometimes you’re so focused on protecting the person beside you that you don’t realize until later how much of the loss you’ve been carrying yourself.

I had already started becoming a dad in my own mind, even if I never got the chance to be one to that child in the way I expected.

I think that part of a father’s grief deserves space. Not instead of a mother’s experience, and not in comparison to it. Just alongside it.

How “21 Weeks” Became a Song

“21 Weeks” came from trying to understand this loss.

The idea at the center of the song was simple: how do you say goodbye to somebody you never got the chance to say hello to?

I found myself talking to our baby all the time when I was alone. I was driving down the road one afternoon, talking to them, and said, “I hope you know how much I love you.”

Once I started thinking about that, I kept coming back to all of those future memories.

The things I assumed would happen someday.

The ordinary parts of being a parent.

That became the heart of the song.

I was trying to put language around this strange kind of grief — the love you can have for someone you never got to know, and the life you can miss even though you never got to live it.

The song was written with my friends Cole Miracle and Schmitty and later produced by Dan Rodriguez.

I decided to release it on October 15, Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day.

The date felt more important than a traditional release.

If this song was going to exist publicly, I wanted it to enter the world on a day when families like ours are already remembering.

What I Hope Another Parent Hears in It

I don’t expect a song to fix grief. The whole process has been very therapeutic for me personally, but there are certainly parts of grief that will always exist.

What I hope “21 Weeks” can do is give someone a few minutes where they feel understood.

Pregnancy and infant loss can be incredibly isolating because so much of what was lost existed inside a family before the rest of the world ever had the chance to see it.

Other people may never have met your baby.

They may never have seen the future you were imagining.

But you did. That love was real. Those hopes were real, and the grief that comes from losing them is real too.

For fathers in particular, I hope the song gives permission to acknowledge that. You can be strong for your partner and still be devastated yourself. You can support someone else while also needing support. You can miss a child you never got to raise, and you don’t have to justify why it hurts.

If another mother or father hears “21 Weeks” and thinks, “Somebody else understands what this feels like,” or, “I’ve been trying to put this into words for so long,” then the song has done something meaningful.

Our baby didn’t get the lifetime we imagined. This song is extremely personal to my family, but I don’t want it to just be mine anymore.

I hope anyone who has experienced this — or loves someone who has — can listen and know they’re not alone, and that it’s okay to talk about it if and when they’re ready.

Listen to “21 Weeks”

Find all the ways you can listen to Ben’s song here →

Learn more about Ben at benjohnsoncountry.com