My grief is so great I fear I can’t be happy again...

This powerful letter presents me with a problem for which there is no answer and i print it in humble acknowledgement of the vastness, the endlessness, of love and of grief which requires the head to be bowed.

You began your letter by saying (omitted here) that many people ‘have no real understanding’ of grief. As one who has been writing about this subject from time to time for many years i know you are simultaneously right — and wrong.

isn’t the ongoing sorrow you describe like a circle of fire which only those who have had a similar experience can cross? We are permanently marked by the traumas that afflict us in life — my own was the stillbirth of my second son (after a long labour), which can still hit me like a truck after 45 years.

i used to despair when people talked of ‘getting over it’ — just as you are doing now. The point is, those who have experienced grief know that you don’t necessary want to ‘move on’ — even if it were possible. That’s because moving on can seem like a betrayal of the beloved dead. And yes, stephanie, those who have stepped over that ring of fire do understand the feeling.

it appears to you they don’t, because grief is making you so very lonely. But can you take me on trust when i assure you there are readers who have absorbed your sad, angry letter with a gasp of identification — because it expresses how they feel?

There are no rules — as you imply, when you mention grief’s ‘five stages’ (denial, anger, bargaining, depression

and acceptance), originally listed by the great expert on bereavement, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross.

It can indeed be irksome when people (often for the best reasons) tell you these things.

But what would you have them do? Isn’t silence worse? Yet even helpless silence can be an indication not of indifference but fear. We all quail in horror to imagine the deaths of those we truly love. That is why, in the end, we close our ears to the crying of somebody locked into a private grief.

It becomes intolerable because it is frightening — and that’s why I ask you not to dismiss your family and friends. They want you to ‘come to terms’ with your loss because they care about you — but also because there is only so much sadness we can bear.

Last year, David Kessler (a coauthor of Kubler-Ross) published his book Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage Of Grief. I know you can’t concentrate now but — who knows? — you might reach a stage when this (as well as Julia Samuel’s Grief Works) is useful.

It’s important to understand that Kessler does not just theorise, but has himself experienced terrible grief. As a child, he witnessed a mass shooting at the same time his mother was dying.

Then a distinguished career as an educator about end-of-life trauma and grief gave him an accumulation of knowledge and experience — but could not stop his life being shattered by the sudden death of his 21-year-old son.

You say ‘I will never be happy again’ — and I wouldn’t dare to patronise you with bland assurances that, in time, you will. Because maybe you won’t.

Maybe some of us reach the bottom of our own pot of happiness, having used it all up, and cannot glimpse any hope. That is where you find yourself, after two years: your current, and maybe permanent, reality.

You will almost certainly deny it is possible to find any meaning now (which Kessler explores) because your only meaning in life came through your mourned partner. All I can suggest is you consider this: although you ‘will never have again’ the wonderful life you shared with your beloved, nevertheless no power on earth can take from you the memory of those times.

You are the keeper of the flame. The repository of precious knowledge and little jokes.

What do you think your partner would have you do with them? All that you shared is absorbed into your very being, every minute of every day — and perhaps that which you feel now as a burden of sadness could be turned (by focusing on the flame) into the most sacred duty of love. A most precious gain, as well as a loss.