Moontanman

All my sympathy and condolences, Moon.
I am saddened by your loss, and wish there was more we could do than proffer sympathetic words.
After many years of talking to you, and getting to know you, I hope you know that you have a lot of friends, here, that can lend an ear in your time of need.

Keep buggering on. Do what you have to do: inform everyone, arrange the funeral and all that. When my wife died I found the problem was the emptiness after all that was done. Luckily, in a sense, I had a teenage son to bring up, so I had to keep life running normally and keep up appearances. If it is just you in the household now, I can imagine it must be even harder to keep going.

As for asking your wife what to do, that goes on a long time. Even now, 5 years on, I often find myself asking what my wife would want or how she would have handled something. I also still get a lot of dreams in which she is present. Often we chat and I ask how she can be there in spite of being dead, and things like that. It is all very friendly but I wake up feeling a bit strange. (I wonder if such experiences are common and whether that may be where the idea of ghosts comes from.)

It's a bit of a marathon. Life will acquire meaning again, but it will take time.

You have all my sympathy.

So sorry to hear this.