its one month tomorrow since my wife passed away. On the 31st of july would have been our 38th wedding anniversary. We had a wonderful marriage and loved each other more and more each passing year. For the past 8 years i have been caring for my wife as she suffered badly from the effects of oral cancer and radio therapy. she broke her hip and was admitted to hospital but acquired pneumonia owing to her very fragile state and osteoporosis and passed away, very peacefully. She is now free of pain and suffering for which i give thanks.
Sometimes i seem to be coping, then just burst into tears. I missed her every minute of every day. My family are wonderful and support me all the time but its when i am alone in our house the loneliness sets in. I am by nature a very outgoing person but at present i just want to hide away from the world and live with my memories,
I can’t explain the pain, i feel totally empty inside but at same time the hurt is terrible.when my wife died she was 69, I am 75 but lucky to have good health and mobility
perhaps someone who has been through similar circumstances can offer advice
One month on you’re just at the beginning of grieving, it’s a rollercoaster with peaks where you think you’re doing OK and troughs where you just want to join your soulmate.
We each deal with it in our own way, I have rediscovered my faith in God, I also believe we carry part of our partners in our hearts when they leave. Everlasting life isn’t just in heaven, our loved ones live on as long as we do because they were part of us for so many years.
My partner and soulmate passed on April 1st, she was barely 61 and only got six weeks from the diagnosis of cancer to dying in the ICU of sepsis. I miss her like crazy.
Like the rest of us you’ll learn to deal with the grief one day at a time. Reach out if you need help, bawl your eyes out when you need to and if it feels right to be alone then lock yourself away. Too much solitude though may bring on anxiety and depression. I find sitting on a bench watching the world go by to be calming.
Always remember she is still with you in your heart, talk to her every day, she is in a better place now and will be waiting to greet you when your time comes.
thank you for your kind reply Carl, I see myself in most of what you say, from both our wives dying in ICU. You find sitting on a bench to be calming which I do I also find walking to be helpful but its when I return and find the house empty then the pain returns, I to believe that Jean is in my heart and helping me all the time and yes I talk to her all the time and I believe that meeting her again when my time comes keeps me going
Maybe I’m fortunate in the respect that I literally lost everything when my sweetheart passed, we were never legally married and everything we shared was at her home in America. Her grown up children inherit everything. I’m now almost 64, back in England, staying in a spare room at my elderly parents house and looking for work.
I spent a little under three months in the house we shared before I returned to the UK. It was hard but her relatives were very supportive and there was always lots to do. We still had one horse left on the property to take care of and five acres of land to maintain. I was the only one who knew where all the financial information and insurance policies were kept. I spent a lot of the time before I left getting the medical bills in some sort of order.
Being here though is still hard, I see in my mind the house exactly as it was, see her in her chair watching her silly TV shows I would gripe about.
Losing the person we loved more than anything in the world is the hardest thing to deal with, nothing else really matters but we have to carry on for them.
There is no easy answer, we just have to be take it one step at a time.