Widows & Widowers Support Group
This community is dedicated to those who have lost a husband, wife, or partner. Anything is open for discussion here, with the hope that we can focus on grief, bereavement, life after loss, and continuing on after a great loss.
About six weeks after my husband died I visited our son and his family. In the waiting area of the airport, another woman struck up a conversation with me and she was also a widow. She told me that often it gets worse after the first few months, because for the first few months you are protected by a sense of shock.
At five months, I think I see what she was saying. It's better in so many ways, but worse in others.
The sense of shock is there, apparently, even if the death is expected. My husband was terminally ill for 16 months before he died, so certainly I knew it was coming. But afterward, I realized that yes, intellectually, of course I knew he was going to die. But as long as he was alive, he was alive, and we focused on that. One of our sayings to each other that past year was "Yep, you're going to go but you aren't going to go TODAY, so let's eat breakfast!"
He suffered so much in the end that I was actually relieved for the first few weeks after his death. Only then did it begin to sink in that he was really gone.
And it seems to be sinking in deeper as the time goes by.
They say it gets better with time and I believe that it does, but I also believe that the hole he left in my heart will never be completely healed.
Sylvia
In reading, I refer to the following frequently:
"You can control your ability to look on the bright side"
jdp
I'm so sorry for your loss. I lost my husband 5 months ago and I've often read that once the shock wears off, usually around 5-6 months after the death, the grief increases. I . and I can attest that is the absolute truth. I have now cried approximately 150 days in a row, but whereas before I wasn't really able to summon up memories of my husband because I was still in shock (his death was sudden and unexpected) now it's the memories and the reality that he is gone that is so extremely painful. I don't usually pray, but I can only hope that at sometime our hearts won't be so heavy.
Kim