James Van Der Beek reveals wife suffered fifth miscarriage at 17 weeks pregnant just months after the last one
Actor James Van Der Beek shared some tragic news on Saturday, June 20. His wife Kimberly Brook suffered another miscarriage. The ‘Dawson's Creek’ actor took to Instagram to announce this news.
“After suffering a brutal, very public miscarriage last November, we were overjoyed to learn we were pregnant. This time, we kept the news to ourselves. But last weekend, once again, 17 weeks in... the soul we’d been excited to welcome into the world had lessons for our family that did not include joining us in a living physical body,” he wrote on Instagram.
He further wrote, “We rushed [Kimberly] to the hospital by ambulance for another harrowing night of blood transfusions. And as I stood by, grateful for the good people who navigated the maze of regulations to save her life -- but helpless to do much for the woman I loved other than massage her feet and try to keep her warm (with my #DWTS robe, ironically) -- something kept running through my head, again and again, which I now feel compelled to share.”
"We’ve got to take better care of each other. The world is in pain right now. There’s denial, shock, numbness, anger -- all the old patterns we cling to when deep trauma is unearthed. And there are no words to ease that pain... to make the process hurt less or to solve it quickly,” wrote Van Der Beek. “But the way out of it? Starts with an open, broken-hearted contemplation of this question: How can we take better care of each other? And to all the families who have gone through this... you are not alone.”
In November 2019, Van Der Beek revealed the news of their miscarriage during ‘Dancing with the Stars’ and dedicated his dance to his wife. “My wife Kimberly and I went through every expecting [a] parent’s worst nightmare. We lost the baby. The little soul that we had expected to welcome into our family took a shortcut to whatever lies beyond," he said.
This is Brook’s fifth miscarriage. The couple share five children -- nine-year-old Olivia, eight-year-old Joshua, six-year-old Annabel, four-year-old Emilia, and two-year-old Gwendolyn.
Earlier last year, Van Der Beek opened up about their first three miscarriages. He said, “First off, we need a new word for it. 'Mis-carriage,' in an insidious way, suggests fault for the mother — as if she dropped something, or failed to 'carry.' From what I’ve learned, in all but the most obvious, extreme cases, it has nothing to do with anything the mother did or didn’t do. So let’s wipe all blame off the table before we even start.”
He added then, “It’s painful and it’s heartbreaking on levels deeper than you may have ever experienced. So don’t judge your grief, or try to rationalize your way around it. Let it flow in the waves in which it comes, and allow it its rightful space. And then -- once you’re able -- try to recognize the beauty in how you put yourself back together differently than you were before.”