[combray]

My wife suddenly died 4 years ago, we had 3 little kids at the time. You need to focus on a) being kind to yourself, whatever that means to you and b) the good things about the change. All change has good parts and bad parts, and it's easy to focus on negative things. Especially with a death since in magnitude they are probably greater than the good things. But if you focus on what you lost you will simply lose the rest of yourself.

I also think that women have a harder time with this than men, possibly because maternal death in childbirth used to be so much more common. But this is just a guess. Certainly until it happens to you its not the sorts of things that you think about too much, and once it does happen you tend to speak to people who are going through the more acute phase of it since they are still actively processing it.