When our son, Ethan, died at sixteen, I felt like part of me died with him.
\nMy husband, Sam, reacted completely differently.
\nHe never cried.
\nNot at the funeral.
\nNot when we packed Ethan\u2019s room.
\nNot even when I broke down in the kitchen weeks later.
\nI started believing he simply didn\u2019t feel the loss the way I did.
\nThat resentment slowly destroyed us.
\nEventually, we divorced.
\nSam remarried a few years later, and we rarely spoke.
\nThen, twelve years after Ethan died, Sam passed away suddenly.
\nA few days after his funeral, his wife, Laura, came to see me.
\nShe carried a worn cardboard box.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s time you knew something,\u201d she said.
\nInside were dozens of letters addressed to Ethan.
\nSam had written one every year on our son\u2019s birthday.
\nHe wrote about missing him.
\nAbout blaming himself for the accident.
\nAbout sitting in Ethan\u2019s old room at night because he couldn\u2019t cry in front of me.
\nLaura explained that Sam believed he had to stay strong because I was falling apart.
\nSo he swallowed everything.
\nHe had even started therapy years after our divorce.
\nAt the bottom of the box was a letter addressed to me.
\nIn it, Sam wrote:
\n\u201cI know you thought I didn\u2019t grieve. The truth is, I was terrified that if I started, I would never stop.\u201d
\nI sat there crying over a man I had once believed was cold.
\nWe had both lost the same child.
\nWe had simply learned to hurt in completely different ways.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When our son, Ethan, died at sixteen, I felt like part of me died with him. My husband, Sam, reacted completely differently. He never cried. Not at the funeral. Not when we packed Ethan\u2019s room. Not even when I broke down in the kitchen weeks later. I started believing he simply didn\u2019t feel the loss …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10149,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10148","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10148","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10148"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10148\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10150,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10148\/revisions\/10150"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10149"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}