Samantha Busch is still struggling to find a new normal without her husband, late NASCAR legend Kyle Busch, two months after his shocking death at age 41.
“You’re still the last thing I see when I close my eyes and the first thing when I wake up,” she wrote via her Instagram Story on Sunday, July 26, alongside a trio of photos featuring the couple sitting on what appears to be a dresser in their home.
On the next slide, Samantha, 40, showed a picture of her bed, which has a body pillow and a red t-shirt taking up one side.
“In the evenings when the kids go to bed, the silence and loneliness is almost unbearable,” she wrote over the image. “I pace the house thinking of all our memories. I sleep tucked on my side of the bed with a body pillow and his shirt pretending he’s still next to me. I hate it so much that his shirt doesn’t smell like him anymore.”
Kyle died on May 21, one day after he was found unresponsive in a racing simulator in Charlotte, North Carolina. It was later determined that he died after the pneumonia he was battling progressed into sepsis.
In addition to Samantha, Kyle is survived by the couple’s two children, son Brexton, 11, and daughter Lennix, 4.
Since Kyle’s death, Samantha has been open about the grieving process. She also took to Instagram on Friday, July 24, where she described the physical and emotional toll of her husband’s death.
“There is so much I want to share about what losing Kyle has really been like. Not just the sadness but the physical pain that grief causes,” she wrote. “The trauma. The disbelief that still hits me every morning I wake up. The way my heart and mind can’t fully accept that this is our reality.”
Samantha continued, “I’ve always been an open book. Sharing the hard parts of my life has always been important to me. It’s been how I’ve processed, healed and connected with people walking similar roads. From infertility, hair loss [and] marriage, I’ve shared because I never wanted someone else to feel alone in what they were facing. This feels so different.”
She added that she knows that her honesty may be “dark” or difficult to read.
“Every time I start to write, I stop. I worry people will think it’s too dark. Too much,” Samantha wrote. “That I’m grieving the wrong way. That I should be farther along. That I should keep these thoughts to myself, but the truth is staying quiet hasn’t felt like me either and posting just the pretty healing moments feels fake because it doesn’t capture how truly brutal grief is on every level.”
