Granger Smith reflects on a difficult time in his life.
While appearing on Tuesday’s episode Tamron Hallcountry singer (44) and his wife Amber Smith opened up about the tragic drowning accident that claimed the life of their 3-year-old son River Kelly in 2019 and reflected on their silver lining, the birth of son Maverick Beckham in 2021.
“Well, I didn’t process it well,” Granger says of dealing with the guilt he’s had to deal with after his son’s death. “I was doing a terrible job because it was breaking me… I felt guilty that I failed at one thing — you know, it’s almost a joke that people say, ‘Here’s one thing you have to do is keep them alive’ until they’re 18 and throw them out of the house.'”
“It’s a joke and I failed at that one thing. I failed to keep my son alive when all I had to do was be there for him. And I was in the yard. I was responsible.”
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“I was a responsible adult. Amber was in the house. I had all three kids with me and I failed at that. And that was something that was very difficult. It almost killed me, trying to deal with that guilt,” she said. the singer shares.
“[I was feeling] the same feeling, that it’s our job to keep him safe,” Amber adds. “And there was a moment when Granger asked me to bring the boys in and I had a long day and I had to take a shower and I was like, ‘I just need a break.’ So I went in to take a shower.”
“I felt so guilty that maybe this wouldn’t have happened if I’d just brought the boys in. But then I was also grieving the heavy guilt that [Granger] he felt, blaming himself, when it could happen to anyone.”
The county musician continued, opening the story of the “slideshow” of grief that almost drove him to commit suicide. “That’s what happens in extreme tragedy or PTSD, grief, when something happens in your mind that you can’t comprehend,” he says. “So your brain — and this is my explanation based on everything I’ve thought about it — your brain puts these images together to try to calculate ‘How are we going to end this loop?’ There’s got to be an end to this loop somewhere,’ so it just goes through your head.”
“And for me it was like, River’s face down in the pool, the ambulance is coming, we’re at the hospital, the doctors are coming and they’re saying there’s no way he’s going to come back from this, 0% chance of survival, we’re telling the kids, hands my son Lincoln on the casket. It’s just repeating like a slide show.”
“And my brain is going, ‘We have to figure out how to fix this!’ And there is no repair and it just continues… a moment just like this will come [while I’m onstage performing] when the presentation would start,” says Granger.
“River is face down in the pool… [this would happen] in the middle of a conversation with someone, in the middle of the night, it wakes me up in the middle of the night,” he shares. “At any moment it can pop into my head . . .
“It was about six months after we lost Riv. Endless slideshow. I did some things, therapy taught me some things. I figured out some ways to alleviate it a little bit and I felt good, I felt better. And one night, especially in Boise that night, I felt normal.”
– We had a very good performance – continues the singer. “I didn’t think about the slideshow, almost the whole show on stage. I came down and the band said ‘Do you want to go for a drink?’ And I said, ‘Absolutely. That sounds amazing. I feel normal again. Be with your boys again.'”
“I took a few shots, felt a little tipsy, got back to the bus and thought, ‘This is the first time I’ve been tipsy since… Oh no.’ The slideshow came back and then I thought, ‘Oh no, I’m not going to be able to slow down the slideshow in this drunk state,'” he reveals.
“‘I’m not going to be able to control this with these mechanisms that therapy taught me,’ so I thought, ‘No way. No hope. No way.’ And so I reached for the one place I knew could stop him. And that was with that gun.”
After a long pause, Hall jumps in and says, “You’re here. You didn’t do it,” to which Granger replies, “No.”
Despite going through a nightmare, Granger and his wife found a silver lining in their son Maverick, who was born in 2021. “He’s amazing,” Amber says of her youngest. “He’s never a replacement for Rivero, but he’s a wonderful new chapter in God’s story.”
When asked how much Maverick knows about River since he’s only 2, Granger says, “He knows River. He knows his picture. He loves his picture. He knows that’s his ‘Bubba’.”
“He watches videos. He actually prefers and loves watching River’s home videos. I don’t understand what’s going on in his head or what he’s thinking or why he’s seeing River with mom and dad and now he’s not here and Maverick is, but I think that it doesn’t matter at this point.”
“He’s just very familiar with his brother… there’s so much in common that they love,” Granger says. “They’ve never met and yet they love so many of the same things. They act so alike except River had red hair and Maverick had blonde hair, but they’re so alike.”
“There are no two men closer than any other in the world than River and Maverick and they have never met.”
Along with River and Maverick, Granger and Amber are also parents to son Lincoln Monarch, 9, and daughter London, 11.
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