Everyone deals with grief differently, and every loss evokes a different kind of grief, too.

All of this means that when you lose someone you love, you don’t necessarily know how you’re going to react, and how long you’re going to need.

This is an ordinary part of the human experience – regardless of how horrible and unusual it feels – and in an ideal world we’d all give one another the grace to endure grief in our own ways and along our own timelines.

But the stepmom and stepdaughter in this story have very different approaches to processing a recent loss, and this is causing a whole lot of tension between them.

Read on to find out how the situation came to a head, in a very public way.

AITA for telling off my stepmom after she wrote a speech for my grandma’s service using ChatGPT?

I (21. female), lost my grandma after a long battle with dementia recently. She was a beautiful person, one of the kindest and most calm people I’ve ever known, and I (and my family) adored her.

I spent the two weeks after her death poring over my own speech, trying to work out the proper words to express how much I cared about her and how wonderful she was.

A few days before the funeral I expressed to my stepmom (47, female) that I was having trouble writing my speech, and as she already had hers done, I wanted advice on how she’d structured it.

For context, this is my dad’s mother, not hers, so she was writing about half a page about her mother-in-law.

Let’s see how her stepmom’s response blew a huge hole in their relationship.

She turned to me with a big smile and said ‘just use ChatGPT’.

Now, I hate AI and ChatGPT and am very political, which she knows, but she said it anyway. The concept of someone using A MACHINE to write a goddam FUNERAL SPEECH had me seeing red.

I got angry and told her she had to rewrite it, that it wasn’t fair to my grandma to have a machine pretend to know the wonderfully complex human that she was, and that using ChatGPT was a lazy and unkind thing to do.

She got very upset at me and said she was using it as a tool, that words don’t come to everyone as easily as they do with me etc., then she kind of ignored me for a few days before the funeral.

Read on to find out what happened when the day of the funeral came.

At the funeral, my speech was after my stepmom’s.

She got up to the mic and read her speech, and it was really obvious it was AI: it was super soulless and impersonal. I’m sure anyone under thirty in the room clocked it but it was mostly my grandma’s friends in the crowd who had no idea.

I was so angry at her decision to spend no time or energy stringing a few words together, that when I got up to the microphone after her I said ‘thanks ChatGPT for writing that speech for her’ and then read my own speech.

And what do you know, my human written speech actually brought the room to tears.

But obviously my stepmom was upset at the slight and so was my dad, who said I was being arrogant and selfish for saying that in front of everyone and embarrassing my stepmom.

Regardless, this bereaved granddaughter was still reeling from her stepmom’s choices.

I just can’t fathom thinking about someone as incredible as my grandma and deciding that you’d rather let a machine write your speech than spend any energy trying to write something personal yourself.

She was an angel, she helped my parents raise me, she was always supportive of my dad and stepmom and bought them gifts and clothes and furniture until dementia took her body – and even then she was sweet and interested in our lives, and always happy to see us enter the memory ward.

I don’t think it’s too much to ask that my stepmom spends an extra few hours trying to write a speech herself. But my dad and stepmom are really upset at me so I don’t know anymore.

AITA?

Honestly? Her attitude toward her stepmom’s choices is totally justified.

In not bothering to write a speech herself, her stepmom has shown a side of herself that her stepdaughter can’t easily un-see.

But calling her out in front of everyone at the funeral? That’s where she crossed the line.

Let’s see what folks on Reddit thought about this.

This person thought that she was completely in the wrong for what she said in front of the congregation.

While others explained that grieving differently doesn’t mean one or the other is wrong.

But others empathised with the anger she felt, intermingled with her grief.

Let’s be real, grief makes us act differently to how we otherwise might – and this definitely wasn’t her best day, but it’s clear that she’s devastated at the loss of her grandma and just wanted everyone to honor her memory.

She might not have gone about that the right way, but she’s still young and making mistakes – with all the emotions of grief at play too.

But that doesn’t change the fact that she embarrassed her stepmom and father, and for that she needs to apologize.

That really wasn’t nice.

If you enjoyed that story, read this one about a mom who was forced to bring her three kids with her to apply for government benefits, but ended up getting the job of her dreams.