My experience with grief and death almost destroyed me. While battling cancer, abuse, child homelessness, and everything else in my life, faith had always been enough and unquestioned. I felt strong and under control. The day I lost my husband, however, my complete existence collapsed under me.  At an early age, I lost my father. He was the only one to have loved me. After his passing, I lived under various types of abuse and neglect.  Without extended family, my husband was not only my mate and best friend, he was the only adult to ever love, accept, and protect me, since my father's death. 

As the months passed, I lost all the foundational columns that secured my identity.  I was a building under demolition. A dark age widow sentenced to the king's tower. My execution ordered to be slow, demoralizing, and with continuous strikes of pain! I agree that my description seems dramatic and exaggerative; however, those whom lived such pain find no exaggeration in my words.  Death is to have someone vanish earth, forever and all at once--with absolute powerlessness to save their loved ones.  The emotional pain is such that one's entire body hurts. Aging accelerates. I aged several years after living with grief for less than one.  From the inside perspective of my miserable mind, I remember looking at the abysm of my soul and only being able to see a sentence of empty-lonely eternal minutes, which would last the life I had left.  I wished for a merciful, one-hit drops all, process of death or an immediate and miraculous way to not feel pain. These did not come. I had been sentenced torture. It was to be executed slowly, demoralizing, with continuous strike of pain. The executioner, life itself, robbed each foundational element of identity.  This was the second greatest loss that came after the shock of losing my husband. Friends, family, mental and physical health, perception of identity, work, finances...all seemed to leave me, one-by-one.