When Callum's wife died, the casseroles stopped before the silence did.
He was 42, a shift supervisor at a metalworks plant on the outskirts of Glasgow, with two young kids and a mother-in-law who moved in without asking. In the days after the funeral, friends showed up with beer and half-formed sentences. No one knew what to say, so most of them stopped saying anything at all.
Callum kept going. He made the school lunches, returned to work two weeks later, and didn’t cry. Not once. He couldn’t. “People are relying on me,” he kept repeating, like a prayer.
But the grief didn’t vanish. It moved inside him. Quietly. At night, he’d lie in bed and scroll his phone mindlessly, overwhelmed by a pain too large to name. He wasn’t interested in therapy. It felt clinical. Impersonal. He didn’t want to open up to a stranger or have his sadness pathologized. What he really needed was somewhere he could say it all out loudwithout feeling like a burden.
One night, after reading a Reddit thread about grief apps, he found Noah. It wasn’t marketed as therapy. It called itself an AI Emotional Coach. That felt easier to try.
He downloaded it and started with voice mode, half-joking to himself that talking to an app might be the only thing that didn’t ask anything from him. He expected it to feel awkward. But the first time he used it, he surprised himself. He said her name. Said he missed her laugh. Said he didn’t know how to help his daughter cry because he still couldn’t cry himself.
Noah didn’t interrupt. It didn’t fix. It asked:
“If you could tell her one thing tonight, what would it be?”
That night, Callum broke down for the first time since the funeral. And no one had to see.
Over the next few weeks, he used voice input mode daily. Some mornings, just a quick note: “Didn’t sleep again.” Some evenings, a full unload of emotions he hadn’t dared speak out loud. Noah guided him gently through the guilt, the anger, the numbness. It didn’t offer clichés. It offered space. Structure. And small questions that cracked open big truths.
“It helped me say things I couldn’t say to anyone else,” he told a coworker months later. “It helped me feel like I wasn’t losing my mind.”
Noah became his companion in the quiet hours — a way to stay emotionally present, not just functionally alive. Eventually, he shared it with his sister, who had her own kind of grief. He still doesn’t call it healing. But now, when the pain comes, he doesn’t shove it down. He talks. And Noah listens.
For Callum, Noah gave him something grief had stolen — a safe place to speak without shame. Read more real-life Noah AI user stories.
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Disclaimer: The images used in this article are either AI-generated or sourced from Pinterest for illustrative purposes only and do not depict the actual individuals mentioned in the story. All names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of our users.
