Very sorry about your brother. So young.
When I lost the love of my life, cruelly, suddenly and unexpectedly, I fell apart. Nothing seemed worth doing; everything was pointless. I slept a lot, ate little and lost a lot of weight. This went on for almost a year.
One day, my dearest, best friend, pretended to lose her temper with me and gave me a right, royal dressing down, berating me for giving up. She said I was betraying every memory of my lost wife, whom she knew well.
"Do you really think she would want you to be like this?"
I was furious. How could she talk to me that way? She doesn't understand! It's OK for her! That sort of self-pitying nonsense was all I could come up with.
But, somewhere in the depths, I knew she was right, and slowly, slowly I began to recover. Forced myself to cook something other than beans on toast or instant noodles.
It is such a cliché, but time does heal. The hurt never completely goes away. There isn't a moment of a day that I don't think about her and I desperately miss her. There are still days when sink holes of grief open under my feet, but fewer and fewer. And I am alive again.
We loved to eat, although she wasn't much of a cook. She always claimed that the only thing she knew how to cook was a salad! In fact, we got together over food.
I still catch myself telling her what I'm going to cook today or pointing out something unusual in the market (not literally - all inside my head). The difference now is that when I do so, I smile instead of breaking apart like I did for far too long.
And I have to add, this forum helped (without most people knowing it).
