8 Celebrities Who've Lost Children & Opened Up About Their Grieving Process

The death of a child is an unfathomable loss no parent should ever have to experience, but for reasons beyond our knowledge, accidents, illnesses, and terrible circumstances sometimes claim the lives of children, and no one — not famous movie stars or even the President of the United States — is protected from such unpredictable tragedies.

While miscarriage comes with its own stifling grief, the loss of a child who has arrived in the world and grown and developed their own personality and interests and connections with others is nothing short of agonizing. Nick Cannon, whose son Zen passed away from brain cancer in 2021 at 5 months old, shared on the 1-year anniversary of the baby’s death, “Losing a child has to be the heaviest, most dark and depressive experiences that I will never get over.”

Vanessa Bryant expressed a similar sentiment regarding the incomprehensible pain of losing her 13-year-old daughter Gianna and legendary husband Kobe Bryant in a tragic helicopter accident in 2020. “I can’t say that there aren’t days when I feel like I can’t survive to the next,” the mom of four told People. “This pain is unimaginable [but] you just have to get up and push forward.”

From Cannon and Bryant to President Joe Biden, famous figures who’ve experienced the death of a child express the same unimaginable heartache regardless of how old the child was at the time of their passing. In fact, the 46th POTUS lost both his infant daughter in 1972 and his middle-aged son in 2015, and age didn’t make either death easier to cope with. To learn about how these three and more celebrities navigated the heartbreaking grief of losing a child, scroll on.