Coming up on 2 months and feeling almost precisely the same. You wrote so vividly about feeling like you have had some horrendous surgery. I've felt the same and wondered if it is in anyway similar to how amputees sometimes feel. This part or parts of you removed against your will. The dread of thinking that this just can't be. Phantom reminders - I hear her car pulling up...I'll call her and ask....wait, she knows where that file is...
I was living an unsatisfying life before we met 20 yrs. ago. That changed when we joined our lives together. It grew to such an extent that, like you, I had one sole purpose in life. Us.
Eveything I thought, did, discussed, felt and planned on was in some way intertwined with her.
So now what. The better part of me has been excised. Who am I? I don't even know. What is this life I find myself in? This is mine? The only life I relate to is nothing like this. Nothing.
And who would ask an amputee some of the things we are asked? Do you need help going through her things?? Are you missing her right now??
The only sanity I seem to know right now is seeing how others like you, Dean, are grappling in the same way with the insanity of this.