Losing some-one is such a devastating blow - the key is being kind too yourself - and people said that to me a lot but i didnt really understand what that meant at the time.
First of all if you look to the natural world and what happens in other animals that are considered more salient and have been studied from that perspective is that when they have a shock - either physical or mental they retreat too their lair - so this is natural behaviour - as is us not wanting to get out of bed - we know we have too but we dont want too - the difference between us and the natural world is the systems of our society - with an orphaned elephant the herd will wait patiently near the lair then start to go about their routine and stop by as they pass to check in and literally drop off some food, then eventually they will persuade the baby out and take it too the watering hole -over time the other females will step up and take on the maternal roles -but for them it takes as long as it takes there is no rush - but what we humans do is mark time in a different way -we have work to get too schedules to keep and so grow impatient with the one in the lair, and if you are that one then you grow impatient with yourself - the clocks ticking we should do this this and this - and thats how we give ourselves even more of a kicking than we already just took when we started this grief journey.- the social expectations of others that we have been brought up with and ingested - and so we get hard on ourselves rather than obeying our natural instincts. So firstly youre instincts to hde away in bed are not wrong -but we are not geared to survive instinctively = for many members to get water and food and shelter we have to go back to work too early and for many also, we dont have a herd to drop by.But that doesnt mean we cant tailor what our instincts tell us too our world take a breath and spend some time in the lair when we can.
Secondly look at our perceptions of health - if that kicking was physical and we were injured as badly physically as we are through our losses, neither we nor society around us would expect that we will be back running marathons for a very long time - we would rest and when we started to walk it would be small steps with rests in between - then maybe some physio some crutches a plaster cast and we leave hospital but even then people can see the cast and the crutches and they make allowances and we know it will be some time ourselves before we move on to the next steps - and so we dont even think about running a marathon but just getting by day to day. What society generally cant see though, with grief, is the pain we are going through and because they dont see any plaster casts and crutches they start trying to hurry us up rather than holding the doors open for us and then we start to doubt our selves.
Over time we would ditch the crutches and start to walk faster and sometimes lose patience with ourselves because we still cant break into a jog we still have pain intermitently it is less acute more a chronic ache which flairs up. we look up and see a few marathon years have passed us by - but still, with the brocken leg we know that it isnt our fault and we have to wait even longer and continue to heal at a natural pace before we can think about running it - with grief though we start to think we must be doing it wrong -surely we should have started running by now and again give ourselves a hard time.
So to me what i am saying ( in my long winded way ) is to consider that this early time is like the trauma time after the injury occurs- in the early days we are in shock exactly as with a physical injury- our brain doesnt differentiate between the two things - it works very much like a computer - recognises the signals from our physical reactions - adrenaline release etc and acts accordingly - and thats what the numbness is, our minds way of shutting down the system, and like a computer when we re-start it, only allowing us to function in emergency mode - until the other functions are repaired we will start restoring other functions over time as they repair but if we push it to do that before it is repaired we simply increase the dysfuntion - just as we would if we leaped out of bed with a brocken leg and fell over -so in the same way if you think of the life changing event of your loss as being the same as a physical injury, and in in many ways it is exactly the same, as our physical and mental health is very much connected, then you do start to understand what being kind to yourself means.
seven years for me - and although i still miss him every single day i also decided early on to carry him forward with me - obviouseley in a different way, but to live my life for us both. In the early days though it is really difficult to do and see anything other than the great big chasm at your side that is where he should be.
In terms of the making the physical injury equivalent - i have (literally) climbed a couple of mountains - i never was one for marathons anyway - but i still have an ache which sometimes i am more conscious of than others and it occasionally flares up.I will always have a limp - but it has become a part of me - and it is who i am now, and i have finally accepted that it is ok to be that person.