After her TikTok video about coping with her husband’s sudden death went viral, Holly Smith is responding.
Smith’s original video, posted on September 15, is in response to a comment questioning her behavior following the death of her husband five months ago.
“Your husband just died, why are you acting like everything is okay?” Smith wrote in a comment on a video of her baking with her two children, ages 5 and 2.
“Because he’s not my God, because one man dying isn’t going to ruin the rest of my life,” Smith, 28, says in a voiceover. “One bad thing isn’t going to ruin you. What happened to make you think everything feels bad and dark and depressing? We’ve got to fix it, you’ve got to eradicate it. You’ve got to start walking toward something better.”
In an interview with TODAY.com, Smith said her husband died in April 2024 at age 31 from a sudden heart attack.
“He just went to sleep and never woke up,” she says. “And so right away I had a bunch of people in my face telling me how bad everything was going to look and feel and be.”
Smith, who lives in Morganton, North Carolina, says she and her late husband ran a successful trucking company together.
“When he passed away, the whole framework for my life was gone,” she says. “…Everyone was telling me how bad everything was, and I had spent a lot of time in prayer with the Lord and reading the Bible. And the Bible says you can win in life, so I just stood on that, and it makes people angry.”
People reacted to her post with surprise, noting that Smith was apparently able to handle it so quickly.
“My husband died unexpectedly 4 years ago and I would NEVER call it ‘just one man dying,'” one person responded. “It’s a whole life we planned to die. I know grief looks different for everyone, but wow!”
“I tried this approach when my brother died and had a complete breakdown 6 months later. Please take care of yourself,” posted another.
Smith says her approach may be difficult for other people to understand, but she feels “mentally strong.”
“I don’t even feel defensive,” she says of the online reactions. “I know that the way I think is different than the way other people think.”
Smith adds that she “refuses to grieve.”
“I’ve grieved the loss of my husband. I’ve grieved the loss of my marriage and the nine years we spent building a life together,” she says. “But grief sounds like pain and suffering to me.”
Smith says her in-laws are “very understanding of the fact that, ‘Hey, we have kids to raise. We have a life to live, we have to move on.'”
Her late husband’s father also died at a young age of a sudden heart attack — a fact that Smith says “haunted” her partner his entire life. She says she tries to celebrate her husband’s good qualities with their children instead of always talking about the loss of him.
“I focus on the things that Dad was really great at,” she says. “And I talk about all of his good qualities and how my kids can use those in their lives, too.”
Smith says that while she found the responses on her page intense to read, she finds great strength in her faith.
“I would never be as happy and as good in my life if there wasn’t a real God in heaven,” she says, adding that she thinks many of the people who responded to her are in darker, worse situations than she is.
“I hope people realize that there’s more than one way to deal with the loss of a human being…” she says. “(There are) people who say, ‘I’m more upset about my bird dying than this.’ And I’m like, Well, don’t be upset. Move on. Live your life.”
This article was originally published on TODAY.com
