Sounds like you're having a hard time - sorry for your loss <3

I've noticed that glitch a lot - I think it's maybe related to how long people have to spend on a story before it counts as a 'read'...? Like, I've noticed it crops up with poems and long-form, where maybe the Medium estimation of how long a story will take to read is over-estimated, so people are spending less time on it than Medium expects them to simply because it's a shorter read than Medium thinks it is. But that's just what I think might be happening.