Dad died unexpectedly when I was young. I never saw Mom shed a tear. After the funeral, I remember her going on with her day as though nothing had happened—cooking, cleaning, answering phone calls, folding laundry like grief had simply skipped her entirely.
It always confused me. Even as a child, I thought maybe she didn’t love him the way I thought she did. Or maybe she was just stronger than I understood.
Recently, Mom also died.
While sorting through her belongings, I opened her bedroom closet to pack away old clothes and photo albums. That’s when I found a small, worn cardboard box tucked behind a stack of blankets—something I had never seen before.
My hands shook as I pulled it out.
Inside was my father’s medication box.
The same prescriptions he had been taking before he died.
But they weren’t empty.
They were carefully organized, labeled, and preserved like they had been handled long after his death. Underneath them were folded papers—medical notes, pharmacy receipts, and a handwritten journal in my mother’s handwriting.
And then I understood why she had never cried in front of me.
Because inside that box were records showing she had spent months after his death trying to find out what really happened to him… and the truth she discovered was something she had carried alone for the rest of her life.