Sad days

Not long after posting my last blog my husband of sixty-four years fell ill. He needed my care and so writing took second place. In between doing all the work needed to care for an increasingly sick man, I tried to write. He died in December, just when all around me people were getting ready to celebrate Christmas. And I was bereft of the man who had been  part of my life from the age of eight years. For eighty years he had been there and then he wasn't.
Nothing mattered, even my writing didn't matter. Thankfully a good friend guided me through the pitfalls of misery and I finally published my latest book this month, April 2026. Under a Deadly Sky is my sixteenth book and is birth was as painful as a real one. 
Here's the question: how does one explain grief? What does it do to ones view of the world? Of ones self? Someone told me it doesn't get better, you only get better at it. It seems grief is the great leveller. Things that mattered before are brought down to size. Friends who mattered no longer do so. Situations are manageable where in the past they seemed too big.
I honour everyone who has gone through this process, the path I now find myself on. The courage it takes to get up in the morning, to eat, to clear away the detritus that accumulates during the day. I didn't know how hard it was going to be.
And worst of all, I couldn't write. The very foundation of who I was, had gone.
I stared at weeks, months, empty.
Then slowly, almost imperceptibly, there it was. Slowly, reluctantly the words came. It had hidden behind the sorrow and misery and in the very act of trying to keep my head above the water, there it was. I don't know if what I'm writing is any good, but a least I'm writing.
It seems to me that grief is like a scouring pad, It strips away all pretense, any false friendship, any fake ambition. It leaves you stripped bare. And you have to start all over again.