Your quiet home is a constant reminder that your loved one is gone – really gone. The silence can be crushing and you may find it hard to concentrate. TV is boring and nothing excites you! There is a nagging, restless desire to do something, but on the other hand you just want to withdraw from the world. Loneliness is poor company and so our need for emotional warmth may become insatiable. This need may stifle our friends until they have nothing left to offer you. Seeking ways to escape this loneliness, many widows become “busy addicts”, with an activity for every day of the week and twice on Saturdays and Sundays. They find all kinds of excuses to keep busy so they don’t have to come home to an empty house. They go out with people they really don’t care for just so they won’t be alone. When widows do this, they are running from themselves and their grief. The truth is you can never run fast enough or change locations often enough to avoid your loneliness and your grief. This busy-loneliness varies in length and intensity from widow to widow. Eventually we all get tired and begin to realize that there must be more to life than running from our loneliness.