The last time Elizabeth Higgins Clark’s family gathered for a celebratory event was at her wedding to Lauren Pomerantz on May 27, 2018.

Then came the unexpected bereavements, including a miscarriage.

“Over the past six years, there have been wonderful gains, but severe losses, including the death of six family members,” Clark said. The first was Clark’s grandmother, bestselling mystery author Mary Higgins Clark, in 2020.

It was at her 4-acre home in Saddle River, New Jersey, where the couple were married. Clark’s aunt, Marilyn C. Clark, a New Jersey Superior Court judge, officiated.

“I found a photo recently, and I was the only living person in it, which was unsettling,” said Clark, 40. “I felt my own mortality.”

Like many couples, their relationship started with a swipe.

In August 2015, Pomerantz, then 35, an Emmy-winning writer and producer, matched on Tinder with Clark, then 31, also a writer. Both grew up in New Jersey, about an hour away from each other, and were now living in Los Angeles.

Pomerantz, now 44, was new to Tinder and newly out; Clark, was not new to either.

Over the next two years, their relationship moved thoughtfully. Cautiously. Wonderfully.

After their wedding in 2018, they returned to Los Angeles. Pomerantz continued writing for “The Ellen Show,” and Clark for “Spinning Out,” a competitive figure skating drama for Netflix.

Pomerantz said 2018 was “filled with fun, freedom and love.” She added, “Elizabeth was the first woman I dated. She was my person. Once I met her, everything made sense.”

For Clark, marriage gave the couple stability.

“Before, I had a tendency to catastrophize something being over if we got into a fight, as if there were no way forward,” she said. “Now those thoughts aren’t there.”

The following year, they honeymooned in South Africa. Pomerantz turned 40. They purchased a three-bedroom, French Normandy storybook house in Los Feliz, California.

The couple started to plan for a family, and in October 2019, Clark began intrauterine insemination, or IUI. By November, she was pregnant.

That year was euphoric; 2020 was not.

In January, while Pomerantz attended a friend’s wedding in Mexico, Clark, who stayed behind because of the Zika virus, had a miscarriage. “It was the most traumatic thing that had ever happened to me. The only person I wanted to go through it with was Lauren, and she couldn’t get a flight back. I was alone with this huge emptiness,” she said.

“It was horrible,” Pomerantz said. “We stayed home, laid in bed together for days crying and trying to process.”

That same month, Clark’s grandmother died.

The couple were racing through the Atlanta airport in hopes of making their connecting flight to Naples, Florida, to see her grandmother when they got the news she had died.

“We were on the escalator, and Elizabeth broke down,” Pomerantz said. “I felt helpless but grateful we were going through this together, that she wasn’t alone this time. That was part of marriage to me.”

Then COVID-19 entered like a tsunami. The pair remained in the new house, moving through the grief.

“I was terrified. It was challenging, but we fell deeper in love,” said Pomerantz, a self-proclaimed germaphobe. “We learned a lot about each other.”

In April, despite paralyzing pandemic fears and still devastated by the miscarriage, they returned to the fertility center once it reopened.

Six months after several rounds of failed IUIs, they switched doctors and procedures, to in vitro fertilization, or IVF.

“Because of COVID, I couldn’t be with Elizabeth to hold her hand and be supportive,” said Pomerantz, who described feeling alienated, excluded and disconnected from the experience because of the circumstances. “I was scared for her. I knew she couldn’t go through another miscarriage.”

In November, after being told they had a single-digit chance of having twins, they agreed to implant two embryos. A month later, when the blood test said Clark was pregnant, they were cautiously optimistic. When the ultrasound revealed two heartbeats, they were warned about vanishing twin syndrome, a condition in which one of the fetuses dies in utero and is then partially or completely reabsorbed, and told not to purchase a double stroller yet.

They did the only thing they could: They held onto hope and each other.

Pomerantz returned to work, and Clark continued sheltering in place, recalling this period as isolating.

“Once you lose one pregnancy, you don’t expect the next one to go well,” she said. “I held my breath at every appointment.”

By the spring of 2021, their caution proved justifiable.

At 25 weeks, Clark’s ultrasound revealed that one fetus’s placenta was not attached correctly, and warned that the fetuses, which weighed just over 1 pound each, may not come to full term.

Then, while leaving her doctor’s office, Clark found out her grandfather had died.

Care and bed rest proved helpful.

On June 1, 2021, at just 34 weeks, Clark delivered Freddy and Emma by emergency C-section. After eight days in the neonatal intensive care unit, or NICU, the twins were able to go home.

As their children grew, so did Pomerantz’s career.

Dakota Johnson agreed to star in her screenplay “Am I OK?” which Pomerantz wrote and produced and which aired on MAX in 2024. Pomerantz also became an executive producer for “Strange Planet” for Apple.

To celebrate Freddy and Emma’s first birthday in June 2022, the foursome migrated to New Jersey so the children could connect with their grandparents and cousins, many of whom they had not met. A trip to Dennis, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod followed in July. That was the first time Clark said she felt normal since her miscarriage and her grandmother’s death.

“My anxiety and feelings of isolation started to lift,” she said, adding that she finally exhaled from January 2020.

Talk of moving East surfaced. The couple attended open houses with a broker. They wanted a community with same-sex couples near their families. In September 2022, Clark found a house on Zillow in Montclair, New Jersey, 30 minutes from her parents, who saw the property for them. A week later, Clark and Pomerantz purchased it sight unseen.

With all their losses, losing each other has not been one of them.

“I fell in love with Lauren as my wife, but now differently as a parent,” Clark added. “We came from strong families that we were close to, but this is our family now. We have prioritized our relationship and made sure to keep dating each other through parenthood.”

For the first time, the pair is working, writing and producing together on two projects: a puppet series for preschoolers called “Wooby & Fotty,” shown on YouTube, and a one-hour crime drama about a grandmother and granddaughter crime-solving team based on Mary Higgins Clark’s books.