Break My Heart Sweetly, Like You Always Do

Thanks to everyone who wished Coco a happy birthday—although she doesn’t check the comments often (because she’s only one, and I’m opposed to letting one-year-olds have social media accounts), I passed on your well-wishes.

Today was complicated, and made me experience all kinds of complicated thoughts. Insert surprised emoji here.

I had the dentist’s appointment that Kellie had scheduled for me, and it was a real challenge to show up to that because of the fact that I have relatively severe dental anxiety. The hardest thing about that is that I don’t feel like I’m allowed to legitimately be anxious about seeing the dentist, because I’ve only ever had one cavity in my entire life. So many folks (including Kellie) have had all kinds of dental surgeries and extractions and fillings and crowns, but I’ve somehow escaped all of that through sheer good luck (along with my mother’s genes).

What that means is that I exist amidst all this fear of dentistry because I just haven’t had any of these experiences that almost everyone else has. My fear comes from a place of privilege and lack of experience, not from a place of trauma. I have zero experience, so I don’t feel qualified to worry about it as seriously as I do—but the fear is still there, believe me.

The last time I went to the dentist without having Kellie present was sometime in high school. It feels really, really hard to make myself go to doctor’s appointments without her there to support and talk me through them. And the appointment today was even made by her, not me.

I was able to stave off the incredible weight of not having Kellie there until the receptionist asked me how I’ve been doing and then said that she went to school with her. That led me to the conversation about how nobody will ever know what killed her, and by the time I made it to the car I was officially having a hard time.

I reached out to a friend and to my parents, and that helped a little bit—but the tears kept coming for a while, to the extent that I couldn’t see well enough to feel safe driving and needed to sit for a bit until the moment passed.

I hate this so much, and that doesn’t make even a tiny bit of difference. Whether I’m glad that Kellie died or whether that puts me into a spiral of grief that I never recover from, it doesn’t matter. I have to be here and go through this experience whether I want to or not. And readers, to be clear: I do not want to. There is no part of me that ever relishes being without Kellie, regardless of whether I enjoy all kinds of aspects of my life. There’s another example of that wretched duality of feeling again.

To bring us back to the conversation with the dental receptionist about Kellie’s cause of death, I wanted to say something about self-disclosure.

Self-disclosure, if you didn’t know, is the term we mental health folks use to describe things we say about ourselves, either in professional settings or to our clients. That’s always been something that I have been relatively closed-off about. Not because I’ve judged others for being more willing to freely share about themselves, but because I’ve been a pretty private person for a really long time. Call it my introversion, call it my imposter syndrome, call it a trauma response from awful bosses and awful workplaces of the past, but I don’t tend to talk a lot about myself, historically, in professional contexts. Especially compared to Kellie.

When I was discussing my fear about dumping too much on my friends and how scary it is to be vulnerable with people with my therapist this week, she said something that made me shut up and think for a bit. I’ve been thinking about it ever since, honestly. She said, “But that’s not because of Kellie’s death, is it? That’s something you’ve lived with for a long time.” And she was right. My fears about being open and leaning on folks who care about me (because they could let me down or not reciprocate) have been something I’ve been working on for a long time.

Kellie’s death feels like it provides context and meaning to so many of the challenges I’m experiencing in my life at the moment. It’s hard for me not to view this loss as a lens that everything should be viewed through, and I know that all kinds of people view me as “that guy whose wife died”, and do that filtering for themselves. But my sense of identity did not suddenly appear on April 22nd, 2026. I’d been an actual human being for almost 49 years of my life before I became a widower. It’s a really good reminder that not everything hard in my life is a response to my grief. Sometimes it’s just that we’re all messed up in some way before we even experience a massive loss like this one, and sometimes we all have stuff to work on in spite of the grief, not because of it.

The second thing I wanted to mention today (because it relates back to self-disclosure) is that sometimes we experience changes in the aftermath of our grief that feel like they’ve happened because we’re messed up due to the loss. I share things about my life willy-nilly now—this Substack is a prime example of that. Anybody in the world could access these words and know all kinds of stuff that I would have kept private in the past.

It’s easy for me to label that as a breakdown in my boundaries because I’m not my normal self since Kellie died. But when I think about the conversation with my therapist, I’m framing it in a really different way these days. I share things with people not because I’ve changed. I share things with people because I always have—but the person I was sharing them all with is gone now. I no longer have my self-disclosure outlet, and that means there’s nowhere for my private thoughts and feelings to go if I don’t share them with someone else external to myself.

I no longer believe that I’m a super private person. I don’t think I’ve ever necessarily been a private person. I was forced into acting in some specific ways by specific awful work experiences, but I was always being vulnerable and open and honest to someone. The biggest tragedy there is that she’s gone, so those things have to find an outlet somewhere.

I sure do like talking to other people, now. Same deal. I’ve spent hours and hours talking to my wife for decades, but she’s gone. So I have to find someone else to have at least a tiny fraction of those conversations with.

I hope this is making sense to anyone but myself. I’m still looking for that sweet spot between private time to be with my thoughts and social time to help me be a little less lonely. This week has been so full of work and responsibilities that I’ve had very little space or energy to spend time with friends, and I feel that loneliness pretty acutely tonight. It’s so weird that I’d feel lonely after spending time with literally thousands of people at that concert and hundreds of people between the three trainings I facilitated this week, but that’s brains for ya.

I have two big tasks to get done over the weekend (the rest of my final project for this class and these grant reviews) but after those are finished, expect me to start bugging folks to come and hang out with me. I miss you guys.

Okay, time to go back to this to-do list. The quicker I do it, the quicker it’ll be done.

Enjoy your weekend, and I’ll try to enjoy mine too. Even in the midst of the tasks.

XOXO,

Matt