You’ve done it. You buried your spouse and you’re still here, living , breathing, walking around. At least physically you are. Mentally though, you dont know where you are, and chances are that you wont know for some months. The first six months for me, were anything but memorable. In fact, I can’t remember much of them even now. There were very, very low points where I found myself begging for death. I was a widow that had awfully vivid dreams during this time period and I found myself wanting to spend more time sleeping to be with my husband than to be awake and live reality without him. I tried to live, I tried to “move on” but I found much of my life had no purpose and I don’t really know who I was or what I was doing. I would say it took me a good six months to get started on settling into life on my own. I believe from month one to six was mostly a mental rebuilding time. I was coming to terms with the permanence of death, being alone, my faith in God, and even my own mortality. I spent days in fogs, weeks in grief, and sometimes I even smiled and thought I would live through it. I knew the feeling I was going through was one of the most horrible things I would ever deal with in my lifetime and everyday that passed I was closer to not feeling it anymore. There would always be sadness and I would always miss him, but this paralyzing grief would not be mine to own forever. It has to be said though, that saying months one through six was this, or six to a year was that, is using it very loosely. There will be gray periods where you will fall back and times where you will miraculously spring forward in your healing. Nothing about grief is definite. Theres times throughout where you may feel just as pessimistic or even optimistic as you did before. Just know, as you go through the process , the days will get better, and the “foggy” days will be more few and far between. One good thing that I did gain in these six months was courage. Even though sometimes my courage could have been mistaken for mental illness at times , and as bad as this may sound to people who haven’t been there before, it felt good to not fear death, to know I could do anything I wanted and made me feel surprisingly stronger. The strength continued throughout the next six months, and soon I became a military widow, proud, strong, intelligent and able, who can look back at the memories of my husband and smile for all that he was.