There’s a version of strength most of us were handed early — hold it together, keep moving, don’t let them see you struggle. It served us in a lot of rooms. It doesn’t serve us in this one.
Loss doesn’t care how strong you are. It doesn’t care that you’re the one people lean on, the one who’s supposed to have the answers, the steady hand at the funeral, the job, the family dinner table. Grief walks in anyway, and it asks something most men were never taught how to give: to stop performing okay and actually feel what’s happening.