Sometimes you read a story on the “Am I The Ahole” subreddit, and it’s not really a story about aholes at all. It’s just a story about a situation so impossible, so heartbreaking, and so completely devoid of a “right” answer that it just makes you want to sit down and cry. This is one of those stories.
Our narrator is a 55-year-old father. His youngest daughter passed away in 2023 at just 18 years old. This wasn’t a sudden, unexpected tragedy. This was the tragic end to a 12-year war. His daughter had been fighting cancer since she was a little girl. She was, as he says, the “strongest person I’ve ever known.”
She beat it. Not once, not twice, but three different times she rang that bell. This was a kid who wanted to live. But the cancer came back for a fourth time, stronger than ever, and two weeks later, she was gone. The dad’s description of finding her is the stuff of every parent’s worst nightmare. He went to wake her up, and she didn’t. He collapsed on top of her, screaming for his wife.
This family did everything they could. They gave her the best life possible, filled with travel and exploration, which she loved. The Make-A-Wish foundation even sent them on three different vacations. She was, by all accounts, a beacon of light. Sweet, positive, and smiling even when she was in the most pain. Her friends even started a cancer awareness club in her memory. This was a kid who was deeply loved.
And now, we get to the “problem.” His wife, her mother, is still, understandably, “broken.” She visits their daughter’s grave several times a week. The dad visits, too, just not as often. And he says the words that are at the center of this storm: “honestly I’ve started moving on.”
Before you jump on him, he clarifies exactly what that means. It doesn’t mean he’s forgotten. It doesn’t mean he loves her less. He says, “Of course I still love my daughter to death and would do anything to bring her back.” But he also knows that “constantly living in grief and pain isn’t gonna help anyone.” He is trying to find a way to live with the hole in his heart, instead of letting it consume him whole.
His wife, however, cannot accept this. She’s been picking fights, accusing him of not loving their daughter. The accusation is so unfathomably cruel, it’s hard to read. He’s defending himself, saying he’d give his life for her, but there’s nothing he can do.
Then came the fight that broke everything. She called him a “horrible father.” He, in his anguish, asked her, “wether I should mourn for the rest of my life” and she looked at him and said, “yes I should.”
She said things that “really hurt and infuriated” him, and he finally snapped and told her to go stay with her parents for the night. And now he’s left wondering if he is the ahole for starting to move on.
Let’s be absolutely, unequivocally clear. This man is not the ahole. And you know what? His wife isn’t either. This is just a tragedy. There are no villains here. There are just two parents who have had their souls ripped out, and they are processing the un-processable in two completely different, and currently incompatible, ways.
Grief is not a team sport. It is a lonely, individual, and brutal journey. Her grief is still raw, active, and all-consuming. She is living in that black hole of pain, and when she sees him starting to find a sliver of light, it doesn’t feel like healing. It feels like a betrayal. It feels like he’s leaving her, and their daughter, behind in that darkness.
His grief is just as deep, but it’s manifesting differently. He has accepted the horrific reality that she’s not coming back, and he’s trying to honor her memory by living. Her demand that he “mourn forever” is the cry of a person in unbearable pain, lashing out because she needs him to be in that hole with her.
There are no aholes here. There are just two people who are broken in different ways. They don’t need Reddit’s judgment. They need a grief counselor, and they need to find a way back to each other, not as two people grieving differently, but as two people who loved their daughter more than anything in the world.
When my son died, his dad and I couldn’t even talk about him with each other. I never could bear my husband’s pain. He bore mine for a few years until he told me he couldn’t take it anymore. So all talk about our son ceased between us. I kept my son’s picture on my profile for five years, until I could no longer stand it myself and realized it was painful for our other children. It was eight years before I cried about something other than my son. Finally, after ten years (it’s been thirteen years now), I felt some kind of acceptance. I still break down in public if certain songs are played and it still hurts to mention my son. I will grieve forever and so will you. But you get to choose whether you do that silently or “out loud.” NTA.