One of the hallmark symptoms of Sjogren’s is that you are no longer able to cry. The tears are gone.
HOW MANY TIMES did I upset my darling but she couldn’t express it - no tears? I’m a complete ignorant c**t 
. I hate my self for my ignorance.
Hi James, what a happy and beautiful wife and she would not look so happy if she wasn’t, so please stop beating yourself up. Married life is all about give and take and that is both people in that marriage. Please just remember the happy times, memories of those happy days together. She loved you, what more can you ask for. S
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Dear all,
I so wanted to be the perfect husband to my sweety pie. But now she’s gone I beat myself up repeatedly for failing. Anne may have loved me warts and all but I don’t like myself very much. I failed to be the man and the husband I wanted to be.
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Dear @James71,
I totally understand how you feel about yourself with regard to your wife. I find myself having similar thoughts. All I ever wanted to do was make my wife’s life easier, do the best I could for her and give her nice things. But over the last few weeks I have begun to wonder if the extra stress on her (it’s a long story) may have contributed to the heart attack which took her from me. It horrifies me to think my actions or inactions may in some way have contributed to her passing and I often burst into tears when I “talk” to her about it at night. I’ve always been my own harshest critic, I was never able to rise up to the unachievable high standards I set for myself. I don’t think we can help ourselves from feeling the way we do, maybe we feel it helps us in some twisted way to try to take some responsibility for our partner’s passing, I don’t know. I do know that none of us are perfect, and I’m sure our partners would be distraught at our self-inflicted plight. But it doesn’t seem to stop us from feeling as we do.
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Hello @James71 . We all wish we could have been the perfect partner and done more than we did. If we could have a replay of what we actually did for our loved ones we would find that it was just living life with them as best we could. If we could have done more then we would have done so. It is the fact that we want to remember them and our lives together with absolute perfection and this will never be possible for any of us. We are humans and we can only do what is in front of us at the time.
Please take some comfort in that.
Love and light.x
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James 72.
I could be the perfect bitch when I was annoyed but I would also fight tooth and nail for my Ron when he was sick. We have been like Stan and Hilda on Coronation Street at times and I used to have a temperature and would sometimes throw things in frustration. But Ron was no angel at times. I knew though that we loved each other so much to be able to tolerate our failures and that is all that mattered.
You were happy because you loved the good and the bad in each other. Please don’t look any deeper than that.
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Thank you everyone.
I’m sorry I implied the C word in my original post. I actually hate that word so when it comes out I know I’m at my wits end. Love you all 
Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton had nothing on us.
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Dear Sheila,
Thank you so much for sharing x .
Its only now in hindsight I believe my Anne also may well have been on the autistic spectrum. When I look back she sometimes behaved in ways I’ve never seen or experienced before. I won’t go into detail but I remember saying to her a lot " You’re a funny little kid." And she’d reply " No you are! " LOL. Why couldn’t I see all of this whilst she was with me. We both knew Anne had Sjogrens but Anne never told me she couldn’t cry and me in my ignorance didn’t research it enough. Its not that we argued a lot after the initial years of marriage when young tempers are high. But there were too many times when I was at my wits end trying to understand why my darling behaved strangely. I used to hide my sadness in drink but never became addicted. And even now I use drinking beer every day to quell the ache in my heart. I love her with all my soul. And always will. Anne passed away 12th July 2019 with pancreatic cancer. And I was privileged to be with her as she took her last breath having told her how much I loved her and she was the best wife a man could ever have. And the best mum our kids could ever have.
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Dear Lonely,
Anne and I were married 50yrs as well ! Both us and our loved ones may have lived a similar relationship. How strange is that my friend.
Like you I wouldn’t have had it any different. And as you say ’ The best thing that ever happened to me.’
James xx