Glennda,

I am so sorry your holiday has been taken away from you.  I can relate.  My husband was diagnosed on Dec 26th 2012 with stage 4 cancer which we had no idea he had and died 27 days later.  To have death find you at this time of year is just horrible.  And in your case, no warning.  None.  How we are supposed to recover I don't know.  I just know I have worked on reconstructing my life now for what feels like an eternity and in the beginning which is where you are right now the pain is never ending.  It beats you up.  You think you cant stand another minute and then you do.

All I can say is what I always say to anyone I write to when you are new to this site.  Baby steps.  You are just like a newborn right now only with a lot of knowledge how hard this is going to be.  You are going to have to crawl before you can walk. This is like having to learn to live life all over again.  It is possible and you wont like it but in a way we all try to find ways to cope not because we want to but because we do. And we do because for whatever reason our own spirits have not been invited to join another dimension.  

Lately (actually just in the last couple days) I have tried to wrap my mind around a new way of looking at my husbands death.  I know I was with him in space and time as we defined our existence.  But lately i feel like there are other dimensions where I can't see him but he is there.  I wrote the other dimensions down this morning.  They are his spirit, his aura, his consciousness, his essence, his feelings.  I could never see those dimensions of him even before but I always felt them.  They were there.   He existed to me through them.  So I have to concentrate really hard to help myself still manifest him to myself through those other dimensions.  To convince myself that he never really left me only in his physical self and time.  I have to remember that those other dimensions I always felt and never saw but they existed.  So I am trying now to help myself put him in my life through those dimensions because I still feel all of those.  They never have stopped in the last three years.  If anything those have been the dimensions that have been tearing me apart because within my own mind he still exists there.  So I just need to try and bring those into more of a focus even though I can't see them.  I need to just feel him and let that be my connection to him. It's like he is a ghost but he is there.

I don't know if that helps anyone but me but as I have travelled this horrendous path I have had small little epiphanies of how to better manage this dreaded grief and the battle it wages on the psyche.  It's painful.  It hurts like hell.  And it seems endless.  It does lessen in frequency of debilitating, overwhelming breakdowns but the love never goes away so we all try to find ways to cope with how to manage those feelings. It happens ever so slowly and even now I don't think I will ever really be out of the woods but the dense fog of the shock has almost lifted even though the setbacks we have you curse the skies.  Just know we are here for each other.  It's the best I can say.  

I am so sorry for your loss.  When you need us we are here.  the one group lost my spouse is where most of us post but you will learn from everyone's loss,brother sister, parent son or daughter.  None of us want to be here but we do our best to support each other.
Take care Glennda.  Write when you need to.  We are all listening. 

morgan