The Hidden Grief I Never Knew

The Grief I Never Saw

My son was sixteen when an accident took him.
And my husband, Sam, never shed a tear.

Not in the hospital when the machines went still.
Not at the funeral as I clung to the coffin.
Not in the hollow house where our boy’s laughter once lived.

I grieved out loud.
Sam grieved by vanishing—into work, into chores, into a silence so heavy it split us apart.

I begged him to speak.
He stayed stone.
Resentment built, layer by layer, until our marriage felt sealed in cement.

Eventually, it broke.
We divorced.
He remarried.
Grief carried us in opposite directions, as it often does when it has nowhere to breathe.

Twelve years passed.

Then one morning, the phone rang.
Sam was gone. Sudden. No warning. No chance to mend the fractures left behind.

Days after his funeral, his new wife came to see me.