I thought i was strong too - the second time of being widowed - in between that my mum and my best freind - this was the straw that finally broke the camels back - but dont be angry with yourself, you are human you have human emotions and reactions and you are allowed to be human. you cant be strong all the time no one can you need time to heal and find peace before you can begin to build that strength back up just as you would with any physical injury but you will find strength again - just getting dessed for apointments is a step forward on that road.
Before keith died but after his first stroke i met the strongest person i know on a plane. a woman called Anna I was terrified of flying and being on my own and worried about him - she was too exhausted to sleep having made her way home from Canada.-Tthere was just us on our row and we talked for 12 hours as if we had always known each other.
She was from lesotho one of the poorest countries in the world she had spent her whole life in her village and had only left to go to the nearest town a couple of times a year, but she had learned English from the missionary school when she was little and later worked for an English familly who had gone over there to as engineers to build a dam system. She was 67 years old - both her daughters had married then died from aids along with their husbands, she went and fetched their children brought them up and lived with the stigma surounding them, she coped because she was strong.
Her son, thanks to her employer had got a sponsorship to train and became an engineer and moved to Canada, she hadnt ever met his wife or children and not seen him for fifteen years.
Then her husband died, and that was what finally floored her -she stopped going to church stopped dressing stopped going out of the door except to get food and stopped talking - in her own words she survived but didnt live - Then her son sent her a return air ticket - she got up and went to ask the minister how to get a passport and he helped her fill in the forms, but to colect it she had to go to the capital which was a few days walk. Everyone advised her it was madness and no -one thought she would actually go to Canada once she had seem what the capital was like. but she came back packed a bag and hitched her way into South Africa to Jo berg, got on the plane transferred 3 times and went to Canada - i met her on her return journey two months later.
I dont know if it was some kind of fate thing meeting her, and she will never know how much she kept me going when i got back to what i did,because of what she had done - if anyone could ever show me that i could be strong again it was her, - but she was for a time just the same as you are now, surviving but not living.