I am often asked, "Why is Grieving so Difficult?"  From my own experience my broken heart and my logical brain just could not understand each other. It is perfectly normal and logical to relive, continually, the life that we once enjoyed with our loved one. That endless tape will eventually play less and less, and the dreams will also gradually stop. However, when the reliving becomes all-consuming and interferes in a person’s life, the situation has reached another level. The grieving process is a lifelong process of change. If you understand and can say "yes" to that concept, then life will be renewed. The memories of your loved one will continue to move you and inspire you for the rest of your life. The first few years can be pure hell and yet they can contain the beginnings of new joys.  These joys start out slowly and require nourishment to grow.  When you're in the midst of grieving you may not notice these gleams of light, but they are there waiting for you to recieve them. Many people question the “normal” way to grieve. There may be traces of the old you, but the grieving process has forever changed the person you once were. New preferences emerge, old habits disappear and you make some new friends.  Old friends fade away and you are drawn to others who have weathered a similar loss. All of this is normal. Remember the days when we needed permission to do just about anything - permission first from parents and then from others?  It took me some time before I recognized the fact that widows need permission to bring back some level of normalcy into their lives. I use the word normalcy in the context of having some joy and fun. However, we don’t wake up one morning and feel that we have been given permission to do this or that. It is more of a subtle understanding that life is good, there is much beauty in our lives, there is music, there are friends that help us and there are new possibilities to explore. So we share our stories, our hopes, our disappointments and our expectations for our lives and in so doing we see that we are all unique in our own way. We are then encouraged to live our lives a bit more fully and we learn once more to laugh and to enjoy life as it is given to us. Although our grief will soften with time, allowing ourselves to feel the pain was, in retrospect, the best thing we could have done for ourselves.