Grief is a hard thing to describe to people and a harder thing to experience when it is a new experience.  I have been busy managing and trying to get back into a normal daily routine.  The hard part about that is I now have a new normal.  This new normal is a hard normal for others that haven't walked this path to understand.Addiction and the fallout from it complicates the grief.  When people tell you in the beginning just hang on it gets better.  Well it doesn't get better but it does get easier.  The daily struggle in the beginning literally takes you from minute to minute.  Then it becomes hour to hour and you can get through the day more easily.  After almost four months I can put together a day or two that works okay.  I have read that there will come a time when you backslide. I have hit that wall and it is hard because it feels as though you have to start all over again.  I know that part of that is the fact that his estate is cleaned up.  I paid what I think are the last of the medical bills and I paid his credit card debt.  I know that I didn't have to but it seemed like the right thing to do and I had the money to do it so I did.  It made me feel better and it was probably the last time that I will be able to take care of him.  I spent so much time doing that in the last 18 years and it wasn't always the right thing to do but it was what I felt I had to do.Regrets fill the space that guilt had taken.  It is a better emotion to deal with than guilt.  Guilt just eats away and leaves nothing.  Regret is a sadness that just seems to exist and hang on.  I am waiting for acceptance to come and stay for longer than a day or two.  It is hard to hang on to but it is my goal.School has started for my son and my daughter goes to first grade on Thursday.  My youngest is four now and she has spent half of her life without her Dad.  I worry for them at times about not having a Dad but they didn't have much of him when he was here.  I know that they are okay as I can see them developing in a normal kid happy, tantrum when I don't get things my way and the world centers around me type of development.It was good to get the insurance money to help us live and more than survive but it is also hard to have as I had to trade his life for the money.  I am working on looking at it as a good thing but it is hard.  It seems to be one more price to have paid for his addiction and death.  But it is a positive price as it adds to our security and doesn't take away.  I am still very confused on how to manage and deal with that one.  It spins my head at times and not in a good way.I guess I am just feeling a bit adrift these days and am not sure how to get my feet on shore to make it feel stable.  Yesterday was a head under water feeling type of day and I haven't had one of those in a while and it didn't feel good.  I cried when I went to bed last night and even though that is not new it is still hard to know that is where my head is.  The most ironic part of the whole thing is that when he was alive and doing everything possible to destroy the life that the kids and I had without it I didn't cry at night.  I spent too much time trying to protect and defend.  I wonder if part of this grief is letting go of all of that as well.I just don't know how a relationship goes from being in love and building a family to someone has to win and someone has to lose.  No, I take that back, the answer is addiction and drugs and those things being more powerful than anything in heaven and earth.Just one day, I just have to do today and let the rest go and give it to my higher power to hold because right now it is just too heavy for me.