The ending of ‘we’

This blog over time will outline the steps of my transformation into ‘me’. That process begins at the ending of ‘we’ – an almost 40 year relationship with my husband and soul-mate – a relationship that ended abruptly and unexpectedly through no choice of my own. The first few weeks I was in excruciating agony surviving by living one painful hour at a time. Six months have now past and the pain has eased enough for me to now put some of my thoughts of those first few weeks into words.

Where do I begin to recount the mixed emotions I have felt in the loss of that wonderful partnership – the love that we had, the lost happy memories, our beautiful family, the lost plans for the future, the shared projects together, the care that I gave, the grief, the unfairness, the anxiety, the pain, the anger, the horror, the victim I became, the catastrophic events we endured – or perhaps it seems we did not – being thrown onto a rollercoaster of emotions up and down – all by myself.

I was passing through and am still passing through a grief process – those four to seven stages or feelings that psychologists claim one passes through after a death or loss of a loved one before one can truly resurrect one’s own life again. The end of a marriage is such a loss – I can vouch for that – and it does seem that there are particular stages or feelings you pass through or experience along the way in this grief process on the loss. The stages supposedly include – shock – pain – anger – depression – then finally acceptance and hope. By week six, when I was reading about these stages, it was this last stage I clung onto of ‘acceptance and hope’ as where I would like to be. I felt that if I could get to a point of acceptance then perhaps I could turn the situation around with positive responses and a hope for the future – a positive future.

That was how I started to feel by week five or six. Before that – weeks one to four  – I was in crisis and in pain. Whilst I am aiming for this blog to be positive responses for my life going forward, the process does start at those first weeks of agony – at the ending of ‘we’ – where any positive sign seemed a long way off.