It’s been 8 months since my love died and I am struggling. All the well meaning people say ‘ it gets easier’ …. I want to know when, because right now, it’s getting harder every day.

I shop, clean, cook, I meet friends and family, I go out to events, I smile, I even laugh.

I still go out to work every week, give 100%, even though it feels now that I’m being gently pushed out of my role…. the stuff I love doing is being taken off me, my role is being reduced, and I’m being asked if I think it’s time to retire, just at a time I really need something to focus on.

Basically, I go through the motions to show all is OK but under all of that I am hurting every day.

Every day I wake up and know he’s not there, every day, I wake up with a massive ache in my chest, every day I see and hear things that remind me of him, that hit me like a body blow and make me want to break down. I‘m prone to crying for no bloody reason at all.

On a bad day, I’m scared that I’m having a heart attack because it hurts so much, and I can’t find the motivation to get dressed.  On a bad day I seriously wonder what the point of anything is.

On a good day, I get by, if I make it to bed time without crying it is a really good day, and they are rare.

I guess i just have to keep believing it will stop hurting, even though i know i will never stop missing him, wanting to hear his deep rumbling voice, his laughter, the sound of his guitar, the feel of his arms around me, the love in his eyes when he looked at me, the way he made the worst of days better when he listened to my rants…

And now i feel so ashamed of how i reacted to my mum when dad died, far too young. I couldn’t understand, as a daughter,  how, decades on, she still ached for him every day, why she still cried for the loss, why she struggled to make sense of a world without him, why she often told me ‘I ask Frank what he would do’ when she was going through bad times.

Now i understand.

Fortunately, I have a brilliant sister and 2 wonderful sons, and just thinking about them drags me back and I find the strength to keep moving forward. And I don’t want to let them, or Freddy down.