@snapdragon24: Not necessarily a completely unacceptable option, as long as you can keep it under control. After my mother died; I had run that scenario over in my head any number of times, what it would be like when my parents died, but nothing prepared me for the reality of it: this is the real thing! This is real life! This is really real and it is forever! I know that is a lot of “reals,” but that is how it was for me. I wasn’t imaging scenarios in my head, it had actually happened, and I had no problem crying, but in the first weeks after my mother died I started experiencing anxiety on a level that bordered on panic attacks and they made it very difficult for me to function.
|I could kind of manage at work, where I was busy, and on my lunch hour I took long walks around downtown and found ways to distract myself, but when I got home, in the evenings and at night, I was pretty much a basket case of not just grief, but of overwhelming anxiety. I went to my doctor and he prescribed a 3 week regimen of tranqulizers, which I only took after I got home from work, and after 3 weeks I was still having problems and I got a refill for another 3 weeks and then, after 6 weeks, I was done. I wasn’t over the loss, certainly. I still had a lot of grieving to do, but the anxiety and panic had subsided to a point that I didn’t need the tranquilizers anymore.