I read this the other day, “The loss of a loved one causes a state of shock, a mental block, which is extremely difficult and alienating.” And I thought to myself… “No kidding. Really?”

The process of dealing with my grief as it came in its rawest form was difficult to say the least. To overcome it – to move beyond that state of deepest grief – means we have to experience our grief. It means we have to experience all the emotions. And, experiencing so many emotions at the same time make us feel like we have lost control of ourselves. I know it did for me.

The person who wrote the statement above also said that losing control of ourselves “is almost always a very necessary transitional stage to be able to process what has happened to us. It is like a defense mechanism that aligns our great inner strength in order to produce the energy we need to keep afloat and carry on with our lives.”

More Than Two Years Later

So, here I am now. I have been alive for 19,038 days, and it has been 872 days since Suzanne died. We were together 9,993 days and married 8,416 days. So, it has now been more than 5% of my life and more than 10% of the duration we were married since she died. Does that make sense? Does anything about being widowed at a young age make sense?

While I may end up living another 15,000 or more days, I will never have another day with her. It is stunning to realize that I had nearly half my life with her… and now nothing at all.

But I am moving forward with my life. The waves of grief have slowed. The time between the heaviest bouts of grief have become further and further apart.

I am healing.

The Next Few Years

As I move forward in my life, I have found solace in the fact that I have had time to work on myself and heal. I am pleased with my progress, and I am now writing less about my own experience and more about what it has been like to heal and what I have learned from that process.

This means, it is getting time to relinquish my writer’s mantle here on Widow’s Voice. It’s time to allow someone else (who wants to express more about his/her healing journey) a chance to write, so I will end my time writing on here at the end of January.

From that time forward, I will only be writing for my personal blog and occasionally on Facebook. And I will write until I have nothing left to say.

Over the next few years, I expect my life’s adventures to get more and more aligned with my soul. I no longer see this life as a journey. That means I am seeking a destination. I see it as an adventure with no particular destination or outcome in mind. That, to me, is the greatest gift my grief has brought me.

And no. I am not crazy!