I get quite often told that I am so incredibly strong because I actually survived the unexpected death of my husband.
A good friend said it even in these words: women are stronger than men and when they become mothers it releases an extra ultimate power resource in order to keep the child(ren) alive.
And they become a force of nature when their they lose their partner. Personally I think there is one even higher superpower and that is when they lose a child and realise that they have to go on for the rest of the kids.
Even losing my husband and early in our marriage losing an unborn (& unfinished) child does not compare itself to losing a child either while in labour or already living.
I will always thank my stars that that never happened to us.
It did happen to good friends of ours and she had to go through labour knowing that everything was for nothing, or rather everything was only in order to grieve about the huge loss suffered..
Even today, while they have two children and me having lost Eric, I quite honestly think myself lucky not to have had to go through this.
You see, eventhough I lost Eric, with whom I was more or less attached at the hip, because we did everything together except perhaps showering, I am very secure in the fact that he loved my to bits as I did with him.
We never had a normal marriage, we knew from the beginning that we would have to work our ass off in order to keep it together..
We had little or none in common with eachother and still our marriage survived 27 years till his death.
Quite honestly I am not sure where I would be now if he had not died, because in our last holiday we talked about the fact that we could not go on like this anymore.
I had become quite lonely and unhappy in our marriage and so did he, but we loved each other intensely and like I shared before we always had this metaphor that if we would separate, I would go to Australia for a family visit and he quite happily would stay at home.
But by the time I would be arriving in Singapore, I would miss him so much that I would call him up in tears and beg him to come and follow me, which he would have probably done!
In the end it was hard to contact eachother, although we loved eachother, we could not find eachother anymore.
It was also due to the fact that I had had so little love growing up that I could stay with him.
And at least for the first ten years he had my back always, but when the kids became teenagers and he had to work quite hard and very long hours we distanced ourselves from eachother.
It is weird looking back on our shared lives, because we should have not lost one another the way we did.
We really did have this fierce love for one another, I sometimes even doubt that we would have separated, but somewhere along the line, we like many other couples became careless with our relationship..
Looking back I should have done this and I should have done that, but while being in it, I tried but could not always say or do the right things.
Therefore I believe that our love was soo fierce that it actually survived while withering away.
I also believe that Eric realized that his health was failing, because eventhough he was frustrated and thus difficult to live with, he did something really loving and totally out of the box for me in his last week before collapsing.
It took me also a while before I recognized it for what it was: an act of love and devotion..
Therefore I can say that I have been very fortunate to love this man to bits and having been loved right back by him in his own way.
That is the reason why I can go on, why I can laugh after months of grieving in my bedroom.
You will always be the love of my life and our children and (future) grandchild(ren) will be prove of that!