Usually the stages of grief are shock/numbness, bargaining/"why", anger, resignation, acceptance.

Let yourself experience them.

Accept that they (you) are normal. Do not feel guilty for feeling them.

#1. The right to experience your own unique grief. Many of the people that are trying to help are also grieving. It's hard for people that love us to see us hurting. Or they may need to see us heal as a side affect of their own grief. People try to rush us, advise us, judge us. No one can grieve for us, or tell us how to grieve, or how long it should take. Even if we could walk in their shoes the footprints we'd leave will still be theirs, not ours.

 #2. The right to talk about your grief. Sometimes we don't even know we feel something till we say it. Sometimes the only way to get pain out is to speak of it. Sometimes the only way to get help is to share what we are feeling. There are all kinds of reasons for speaking of our grief..

 #3. The right to feel a multitude of emotions including disbelief, sorrow, anger, loneliness and fear. Grief does strange things to the human spirit and soul and temperament. We often expect, as do others, that our grief is something aside from the rest of our lives and relationships. It isn't. It will affect every single aspect of our lives, and come and go, at the oddest moments, for however long the healing process takes. It may be rude but I tell myself ya git knocked down, ya git up. Chit Happens. Maybe I wallow for awhile, maybe I get right up. I do the best I can.

 #4. The right to be tolerant of your physical and emotional limits. Sometimes life has to be taken not one day at a time, but one breath at a time... just breathing in and out hurts, takes energy, leaves us tired and alone feeling. ...the frustration I experienced was so defeating. I wanted to move on. I expected that to happen immediately because it's what I wanted, what he told me to do before he died. Almost four years later I still have times when I come up to that black desolate place where some of my memories linger and teeter there on the edge of heartbreak. Life has just taken a drastic change from what it was two minutes ago, from what you thought it would be. Your plans, dreams, hopes, and desires might all seem null and void now. Your whole life is now different. Allow yourself time to get used to that. Try to eat. Sleep. Go see your doctor if family or friends ask you to. Get grief counseling if you need to. A healthy body will help your heart heal.

#5. You have the right to experience "griefbursts"-- sudden, powerful surges of grief. Six months into the first year I was still folding my hands across my chest when I laid down to sleep and telling the Lord, ok, I'm here, I'm ready, take me too. One minute I was ok, doing the shopping, and then I'd have trouble lifting something heavy, or the lawnmover wouldn't start (how DARE he buy THIS kind a lawnmower when he KNEW I'd have problems starting it!) or I had to run the table saw alone ( he KNOWS I am afraid of this thing!) or the oil needed changing in the car and the boys were too busy (why in the "H" did he teach me how to BUY a car and NOT how to change the oil???) or nothing would happen ...all of a sudden I'd be crying, or angry, or alone. How DARE he leave me alone after all I had done for him! How DARE the Lord take him after I worked so hard to live the way the Lord told me to! ...the next minute I'd get up and start yanking on the lawnmower cord, going on with life, like nothing had happened.

#6. The right to make use of healing rituals such as visiting the cemetery, creating a memorial or starting a new tradition. ...I got tired of eating alone so I packed a lunch and went and sat on his grave and ate my lunch, talking to him in between bites. It was comforting, and to be honest it was a lot like when he was alive, I did all the talking and he was quiet.  Each of us does it our own way.

#7. The right to embrace your spirituality. ...his family blamed me during his illness, after his death. because the aggressiveness that I had to develop fighting for his life overflowed into the rest of who I was. Because I insisted they let him do this his way. Because, as good as I got at doing for him, I still had never learned to ask for help for myself, and when I got to a place where I so badly needed help I didn't know how to ask, so did it the wrong way. And because, he and I had agreed, when he was first diagnosed, that, if he got to a place where he wanted to stop fighting, I would respect his right to make that choice. He was not a man to ever give up a battle until he had done all that he could. I had to honor my promise to him. But to them I became the woman that let him die. Going back to church helped me. Staying close to the Lord helped me to accept I had done every conceivable thing that could be done... I had done what was right for him, and his death was not my fault.

#8. You have the right to search for meaning in life and death.. ...I went back to church - Sunday School - Wednesday night bible study. Trying to find the reason for this. Trying to find the lesson I was supposed to learn from this. The congregation welcomed me, comforted me, something I needed very much...

 #9. To treasure your memories. My father and one of my sister's died when I was 17, another sister died when I was 23.  My grandfather taught me that the one way I could keep their memories alive was to talk about them. Thirty-seven years later I still speak of them. And I still, almost four years later, speak of my husband. There have been people that have advised me to not speak of him, that I am holding on to him by doing so, that it's time to let him rest. I don't talk about him because it keeps him alive for me. I speak of him because he was the person I shared my life with for 28 years. My talking to and about him never bothered him when he was alive, I'm not going to let death shut me up... just as I'm not going to let anyone else do it either.

#10 the right to move through your grief and to heal. One minute I was wife, caregiver, provider, fighting for the quality of his life as well as trying to make sure no one intruded on his choices. One minute he was lying there, breathing, the very core of who I was. The next I was standing in a room that was devoid of his life. I didn't know how to be who I was because there was no NEED for her anymore. My heart still races and I find it difficult to breath, remembering that moment. It seemed to me that my life ended with his. I was floundering around on the edge of a big black hole.. part of me wanting to fall in to it, at the same time there was a need to fight for life, this time my own, overwhelming me. I thought I had to make a new me. And the only way I could manage to fight instead of fall was with the same single-mindedness that I had learned/used in fighting HIS battles. It's going on four years for me and I am just now learning to be who I am. Maybe if I was a different person I would have realized that I didn't have to FIGHT anyone, or anything, to be myself. Life has made me who I am. People can resent that I kept saying I will do this MY way, I sincerely apologize but I can't help their resentment. The search for who I am, for becoming me, was necessary to me. The only way I was/am able to heal. 

Take it one breath at a time.

Take care of yourself. If you are not eating or sleeping consider grief counseling. Get a checkup at your doctors.

Turn to others that share your loss. It becomes hard to remember that others are hurting, grieving as intensely as we are because this feels so incredibly lonely. But we are not alone. There are others, grieving, sharing our loss, experiencing this walk for the first time also. Our pain isn't more than theirs. It's only different. Each of them will take their own breaths, one at a time, also.

...there is no right way, or wrong way, to grieve... I had people expect me to be done, thru with hurting, to move on in life, when that first year had passed. I spent the first six months working myself into a stupor so I could sleep. The next I lived online, everything I did was timed to being online in the Widow and Widower Support Room. I rushed out to get something or keep an appointment, then rushed back to be online. I didn't even realize I was lonely for 18 months. I'd start a roast in the middle of the night, sleep day times, go for walks at midnight. Once I mowed the lawn at three in the morning. After my home was burglarized I decided I needed to move some valuables to my son's. I loaded them in the car and drove the three hours to his home. It wasn't till they answered the door in their pj's that I realized it was the middle of the night for them. They thought I was behaving strangely, I thought I was doing what needed to be done. Many thought that I had completely 'lost it'. Maybe I had, but it got me thru that part of my life. I'm here, alive, and living a good life. I'm kinda proud of me. I wish each and every one of you success in your own walk. :)