One thing I know is that people grieve differently. When we lost Kyle, I looked at Holt and said, “I can’t lose you too.” Before that, I’d probably taken him way too much for granted, but at that moment realization hit. Life is fragile. People matter and he mattered to me. In those broken and absolutely dark moments, I wasn’t sure I knew how to take care of myself, much less someone else, whether it was Holt or my son Matthew, but I knew we had to go through it together. I knew we had to respect the way each one of us grieved.
I had to read everything. I had to see somebody else who was living after loss. I was the typical “I want to talk more about it”; there were times that I just needed to hear Kyle’s name; Holt, not so much. Holt didn’t talk about it for years. Each one of us was unique and different, because no two people ever grieve exactly alike.
Don’t tell me how you know exactly how I feel, because I don’t know exactly how you feel. None of us do. The only time I got mad was when a woman told me, “I know exactly how you feel,” yet she doesn’t even have children. She said, “My dogs, I would be a blithering idiot if I lost a dog,” and I got mad. That’s the one time I got mad.