I think this has been very much in play for him. He is a self-described small town boy raised in Southern tradition to be polite but kind of taciturn - and not very in touch with his emotions much of the time. As something I recently read pointed out, if you're messaged to control and suppress your emotions, one of the best ways to do that is to hide them even from yourself. But, this often leads to having no words to identify much less express them. The more he feels, the harder it is to grapple with that - part of why his wife's death just took the wind out of him in a spectacular way. Not that a sudden death wouldn't hit everyone hard, but he was just debilitated by it for a long time, to the point that his boss was starting to grumble.

So, it wasn't so much about how I felt, but about what he was able to deal with in the midst of a very hard anniversary. And, as someone who is extremely fluent with her emotions, I still found it kind of inexplicable that it took 4 days to just say, "Thanks, it was a hard day." I guess it's sort of an "I get it intellectually, but it still doesn't make sense to me" kind of thing.