HCE

Good grief! There are some classy, classy people out there. I'm so sorry you had to listen to all that, Christopher.

Nice tunes, Rob! My wife had an eclectic taste in music, which was reflected in the three songs we played at her funeral: CELTIC TECHNO-FOLK FUSION - Peatbog Faeries: "When the Seahound Left Me" MADCHESTER - The Stone Roses: "This Is the One" AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINAL SINGER-SONGWRITER GOSPEL-FOLK - Gurrumal: "Jesu"

Glad you seem to have got through this OK, jgib. On significant days in the calendar I just try to focus on the happiness my wife and I shared together, and be grateful for that. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't.

Because no one else gets it. There are many people who knew and loved my wife, but none of them knows what it is to lose a beloved spouse. I need to hear from people who understand that, and it helps to know there are people out there who know what I'm feeling first hand. I believe if we don't engage with people who are suffering as we are, there's a whole side to our grief that's being suppressed and internalized. This board provides us with a healthy way to navigate our misery.

No. I believe death is final and implacable. After my wife died I had a vague unconscious expectation that she would somehow fade away slowly, leaving behind signs and messages and traces as she disappears into the Beyond. But the silence is absolute. I wish it were not so, but that's the reality for me. On the other hand, I feel very strongly that my late wife lives on in my life and in the lives of those who loved her. She is with me every day, but there's nothing supernatural about her presence.

Here are my guaranteed tear-jerkers. (LISTENER ADVISORY: Some of these tunes fall into the old-timey / country category and may prove offensive to musically sophisticated widdas.) 'It Makes No Difference' by the Band 'Your Lone Journey' by Doc & Rosa Lee Watson 'For Ever, For Always, For Certain' by Richard Dobson 'Six More Miles' by Hank Williams 'Haunt Me' by Aurora Birch 'Walls of Time' by Ricky Skaggs

It'll be six months tomorrow, and I'm still wearing mine. I can't bear the thought of removing it.

I too have had very few dreams about my wife that I can remember. When she was alive she always seemed to be in my dreams one way or another. Very often, no matter what the dream, she would be providing a running commentary on the dream as it happened, or she and I would be discussing what was going on. She, or her voice, always seemed to be present. She and I were so close that everything, asleep or awake, seemed to occur in the context of our ongoing conjugal dialogue. In the weeks after she died six months ago I had several awful dreams involving sickness and death, but I'm saddened by how few dreams I've had about her since. When she does appear in my dreams I seem to be fully conscious that she is subject to death one way or another. I can't remember a single dream in which I genuinely believe she is with me, and not about to die. Or already dead.

For me this awful silence was the worst thing about going back to work. The first time I spent a whole day at work without a single call or email from my wife was devastating. And even though I knew she was no longer around to call or write to me, I somehow felt that the calls and emails would come through anyway. When they didn't it felt like the universe was being overly scrupulous, almost pedantic, in observing the fact that she was dead. Sorry if that doesn't make any sense. In January several people were run down and killed by a crazed driver a few blocks from where I work. I knew that if she had been alive my wife would have been on the phone to me within minutes. But no one called. For many years around lunchtime I'd receive a long email from my wife. I've been reading through them in chronological order, and in the five months since her death I still haven't read them all. They're so much fun to read: my wife had an extremely dry sense of humour and a quirky, whimsical outlook on life that made her emails extremely entertaining. I find myself laughing out loud when I read them. I can hear her speaking to me, and I find that comforting.

This is such a difficult topic. My wife died at home, surrounded by her family. After the moment she died I couldn't bring myself to look at her face. I knew I wanted to remember her as she was when she was alive and I didn't want the image of her lifeless face to remain with me. I sat by her bed while we were waiting for the funeral home to come and collect her. When they arrived, we retreated into the backyard. We just couldn't bear to see her being taken away. It's hard to describe how that felt. I had been by her side every day of her eleven-year illness, and suddenly I found myself allowing perfect strangers to take her away to be by herself. After her body had gone I felt a strong urge to go to her and sit by her, like I had done a thousand times before, but I knew it would do no good. The next day, when we were planning the funeral, none of us wanted to organize a viewing. There was no discussion, and it appears that we all felt the same way. I can't explain that. It felt cowardly and cold, but I think we just knew she was gone. It's terrible even to think about this, let alone write about it. Everyone's experience is different, and I can understand why people would find a viewing very helpful. Clearly it just wasn't for us.

One thing I've discovered over the past five months is that our culture has no conventions at all to deal with grief and bereavement. Nobody knows what to say, and because there's no template many people say nothing at all. As there are no outward signs of mourning, and because one carries on outwardly as if everything were OK, people are allowed to pretend that nothing happened. Or, having paid their respects at the funeral, that the problem is now safety in the past and can be ignored. There's a lot to be said for the old-fashioned custom of wearing mourning attire for a set period. It forced the world to acknowledge that death happens and that it makes people suffer. Isn't it strange that death happens to everyone, and is the one certainty in life, and yet we bend over backwards to pretend it isn't there? I live in Australia, but I'm sure it's no better in the US.

My gorgeous wife of sixteen years died in November. I don't know if numb is the right word for me, but I can say that life has lost all its joy and savour. I used to believe I enjoyed the simple things in life, but I realize now I just enjoyed doing stuff with her. Now those same things are just a burden, when they're not actively painful reminders of what I've lost. I carry on with my pastimes and hobbies, but there's no joy. My life seems to have had all its colour rinsed out. It's a dreary, blasted wasteland.

My wife was diagnosed with primary cancer over eleven years ago, and with terminal cancer eight years ago. That's a lot of time to assimilate, at least intellectually, what was going to happen. The moment her terminal prognosis was confirmed, that was when we knew she would die young, and there's no question I started grieving at that moment. I remember sitting in hospital corridors with her mother crying and hugging for hours on end. That was when I started to live with the fact that she and I would never grow old together. After that horrible time, when her prognosis was very poor, things unexpectedly started to improve. My wife defied the doctors' expectations and went into remission for nearly seven years, despite the fact that the cancer had come back very aggressively. Over that period, while we knew it would end badly, we achieved such a degree of stability and normality that we would go for weeks or months at a time without thinking directly about what was going to happen. I don't wish to minimize how hard it was for her to live in the face of an early death and deal with physical hardship and discomfort, but she refused to waste her time worrying when she didn't have to. Similarly, while I knew I'd be widowed young, only once or twice did I confront this reality head-on, in all its horror. We more or less decided not to waste our time on misery when we didn't have to. After all, the misery would take care of itself. I think this was the right thing to do, and I don't regret it for one moment. We made the most of every hour, and said all the things we needed to say. My wife died in November, and it was not unexpected, but it's only in the last several weeks that the reality of her loss is starting to hit home. I think now that I overestimated the extent to which I had processed and accepted what had happened. I thought I was OK, but now I think I've been hiding from what it means to be without her. I just miss her so much.

I can relate to this, Maureen. I feel like I'm wheeling through the liturgical seasons like a Catholic, with every week bringing a new excuse for commemoration. On Monday last week it was nineteen years to the day since my wife and I met. Next month will be the anniversary of our first trip to our favourite holiday spot, and then May will bring the anniversary of our first date. And so on. The hardest part is facing the first anniversaries of all the things we did together for the last time. I lost her in November, and I can hardly believe that only a year ago we still had our blissful life together. It literally feels like a dream.

Beautifully said, KK. I can relate to every word.