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Chances are One Day You Too Will Lose a Great Love, as I Have, But that Doesn’t Mean You are Alone
Since I lost my wife eight months ago, I have learned a great deal about moving forward despite a tangible loneliness.
Introduction
Since Lorie died last November, I have learned there is a stark difference between feeling lonely and bereft, and being truly alone.
I was never alone after she passed away, and yet I was lost for many subsequent months and believed there was no one who could help me regain my life or any semblance of it.
I was as wrong as I could be.
Looking back, the world was there for me.
Immediate Aftermath
For the first five months following Lorie’s unexpected death, I openly and very publicly grieved. I shared post after post on our marriage and her passing on social media, and article after article on the same topics here on Medium, primarily as self-therapy.
The feedback from both, however, informed me I was not alone, especially as many readers commiserated with my loss having lost partners of their own while others expressed the abject importance of living life for today as there is no guarantee of tomorrow.
Still, my battles to present myself in real-time as anything other than a grief zombie during that period may have been fraught but I made it through. I found additional reason. To be more accurate, I had no desire — then as now — to present as anything other than who and what I truly am and yet within my efforts I also wanted to help people on their own grief journey.
Apparently, presenting an authentic face regardless of frame of mind (and body) was the correct and only way to proceed. And so, despite hours in a day spent laying in bed in an effort to catch up on sleep due to overwhelming bouts of insomnia, and voice-recording many of my public postings due to suddenly shaky hands as a result of my body recovering from shock, I indeed wrote like there was no tomorrow.
Perhaps what I had personally the most difficulty processing within those words, aside from the sudden end of a…
