Widow World - Alone/Lonely

There is a difference between being lonely and being alone. Most widows suffer from aloneness and not always loneliness. When you've lived cheek to jowl with someone a good part of your life, day in and day out, the worst feeling is aloneness. No one can fix that. Your kids, your friends, your workmates cannot cure aloneness. The person with whom you shared almost every moment both awake and asleep, is not there any more. It isn't like breaking up or divorce where you might have contact with the missing individual perhaps. Nothing is going to bring your former partner back. It is another learning experience of the many widows endure. This kind of aloneness is not fillable with a band aid patch like joining a group or immersing oneself into an activity. Aloneness is like a deep, painful wound that does eventually, after a certain period of time, heal and while the scar remains, the pain will subside. At first, every time you come through your front door and stop yourself from calling out "I'm home", aloneness descends. And then comes the time when you suddenly realize you did come through the door and forgot to think about the "I'm home" and you have hung up your coat and put on your slippers and found yourself by yourself without pain. You have arrived. You find you can move about your space more easily and that you have discovered your own ways of doing things. When you assess how far you have come in your new life, you begin to feel a sense of being in a new place, yours alone. This is your home and you are the you that stands alone and does it rather well, you think.  If you have come to that state,  "a long way baby",  you may congratulate yourself. You have coped, you have returned to the woman you lost - in a nice way -  a long time ago.