- Crying in the grocery store.
- Crying a lot
- Feeling Sad
- Not knowing how you feel
- Wanting friends to leave you alone
- Wanting to go out with friends
All of these emotions and feelings happen and more with the loss of your spouse. All of these emotions are completely normal.
No matter if you were married many years, or not very long at all, your life was merged with another human. Death is the ultimate abrupt break in the relationship.
In the early stages of grief, you are learning how to live without your spouse. The years of comfortable patterns that were made together have stopped. It is difficult to now go through life without the comfortable patterns that you built together and start new patterns on your own.
At first you want to hold on to these patterns tightly. It’s almost as though the tighter you hold on, the loss of your loved one will not be as painful. Slowly though, life and moving forward with grief allows a new path to open. You begin to realize that releasing the old patterns do not make you forget or love your spouse any less. Instead releasing old patterns makes way for new patterns and new ways to honor your loved one differently.
This path may be difficult to manage at times. You may yearn for the old patterns. Sometimes you may want to spend days looking back and remembering. Some days you want nothing more than to look ahead and try and see what will happen next.
Be patient, kind and gentle with yourself on your grief journey. Try not to judge your journey or judge your new path by how others are managing their own journey. Also try not to let others judge you by how you are walking your path.
Trust yourself. You will always know what is best for you and you will always know if something isn’t right for you.