Lost my wife of 15 (together 20) years a year ago tomorrow.

Dont hide from the grief. Grieving is a natural process. Cry for an hour or two every few days. Be sad about it. Remember the good parts and bad parts.

The human mind is fucked up. None of your memories are real. Traumatic memories that stay repressed stay traumatic. It is only through remembering those memories from a safe place that you start to quantify them and feel safe around them. Your worst memory is actually just a memory of the last time you remembered it. So remembering it in the safety of your own home while eating your favorite food and listening to your favorite song will over time slowly dull the pain of that memory.

Same for grief. You want to grieve. You need to grieve. But do it from safety and security and over time the pain will lessen.

This is why talking to a therapist is useful because they create a safe place to remember in. But also remember that everyone is different and not everything works the same for everyone. You have to find your own path, be it personal, therapy or counseling or group meeting etc.

Personally I could not do counseling or group counseling. It made me irrationally angry to hear someone try to talk me through it and it made me sad and upset to listen to other people’s grief. So I did my own thing.

Good luck! The great healer is time but only if you let it.

As others have said, you don’t deal with it.

It hurts. It is supposed to hurt. It will hurt for a while, a LONG while.

But over time it will hurt less. It will consume less of your time as days go by. And after a while it will be only the occasional flare-up.

With that said it’s important not to implode. Not to let grief, the attached guilt (there’s always guilt with loss - the what-ifs, the why-did-i-nots, and so on) consume you. Seek out company from family and friends. Try to occupy your free time so you’re not just spinning in your own head aimlessly wallowing.

Also try to refocus things. Mourn the loss, but try to remember the good things. It is important to remember what you lost, but remember it as something you had instead.

Basically you don’t. I mean you don’t “deal with it”. It deals with you. It hurts like fuck. It’s supposed to. Everything is worse now. It will get better though. Eventually the pain fades.

If you have any friends or family nearby don’t be afraid to lean on them for support. Ultimately all we have in this world are the connections we make, that’s why it hurts so much to lose one forever. Use the ones you still have.

I don’t have advice, but I can share my experiences.

When I was young, a family member died (cancer): I soldiered through it. Yes, there were some tears shed, but by and large I just pushed through it.

Fast forward 10+ years, I always felt I never really “processed” it. At least on an emotional level, I was always detached and not really “present”. It’s been something, I wanted and have been trying to address, but with limited success.

Recently, a close friend was diagnosed with cancer (probably terminal). I am a point in time in life, where I don’t need to soldier on. I’ve emotional grown confident enough, that this time - I’m allowing myself to sit with this pain.

Words cannot express the gut-wrenching sorrow it brings. …yet, I welcome and allow it. I tell myself that the depth of the sorrow, is relative to the depth of love I have for this person and that I’m capable of carrying. How painfully beautiful it is to “feel” in this moment. At moments, there is a certain catharsis in all the tears being shed.

I’ve started to play the guitar, just so I can play Smashing Pumpkins “Landslide”. I can’t sing and I can’t play, but I can channel that sorrow into those lyrics in a way, I could never before.

And as much as all this hurts - it also feels healthy, it feels human.

One thing I did was, share this with the people I work with. Not necessarily the deals (effectively what I shared here). I told my boss, it will impact my performance and might require some flexibility in my schedule as I want to be able to support my friend. For me, this was an (accidental) wise move: I’m not expected to “keep it together” …try as I might, I am failing: anger bleeds out in unexpected ways, I miss details on tasks (cause I’m not focused). And that is “okay”, I apologize, people understand the why - some share their tales of grief - and we move on.

tl;dr : give yourself permission to feel, to mourn. Bring people into your life. Be “proud” that the sorrow you carry is purely a reflection of your capacity to love. Hiding from it, suppressing it, won’t make it go away.

Counseling/therapy. Friends. Family. Community. Psychiatrically prescribed drugs, if the depression is severe enough, and your counselor and psychiatrist agree it’s a good idea.

a therapist, grief conseling, or look for someone with similar sitiaution in person or online. looking for food or games to escape isnt healthy too, take a break from work

Process it, don’t bury it.

When I lost someone decades ago, a friend of mine said,“Allow yourself 3 days to grieve. Then remember them happily.” It helped me.

Community and Daoism. Being with loved ones and reading the Zhuangzi, basically.

The Zhuangzi spends a lot of time talking about the inevitability of change in a way I found amusing, easy to understand and profound without being mystic. It also has a bunch of odd tales that encourage thinking about things beyond the human time scale, which i found oddly comforting. Kinda like the disassociation of booze/drugs, but less unhealthy.

Weep.
Take your time.
Talk about it.
Repeat.

Fuck if I know.

Talking to friends, making new ones, leaning on my surviving family, and my therapist.

Don’t pish yourself to “move on” if you feel like it’s not what you need.

Too many people try to push the idea that you have to always move on and basically completely stop feeling bad after a while (and often a short one) but that’s bullshit. Think about what you need, what you want, try to find inner peace whether it is by keeping your emotions, or letting them go.

And obviously, therapy.

Its ok to be sad and to take as much time as you need. Everyone’s grief looks different. It’s really hard and I hope you have family or friends you can spend time with.

By giving yourself time to heal, being mindful of your emotions, talking about your experience and feelings with others