Many people each year go through the devastating experience of having a wife, a husband, or a child die, but it is different when it happens to you. If you are like most people, you were totally unprepared and have still not recovered. As a psychologist and a widow, I know how difficult it is to recover emotional balance following the death of a loved one, but perhaps a few suggestions may help. Perhaps most important is the fact that it really helps to know about what kinds of feelings and experiences are "normal" or natural for a bereaved person to have. Many have found their feelings so intense and their behavior so unlike their usual pattern that they have begun to doubt their own sanity. It can be reassuring to discover that others are having similar difficulties and that much of what you are going through is a predictable reaction to a severe loss. We who have suffered such a loss may be expected to go through a number of "grief stages" before recovering our emotional equilibrium. We will probably never fully recover, but much can be done to make our lives more bearable and meaningful. At first there is simply numbing shock and the denial that the loved one is really gone. "No. It can't be true." Probably the shock and numbness carried you through the difficult days of the funeral when family and friends gathered around to help. Their support was needed, for most of us were acting mechani cally?going through the motions in a daze. We probably were unable to drive safely, to make reasonable decisions, or sometimes even to take care of the simple necessities of living. Or we may have appeared to be functioning calmly because full realization of the loss had not yet sunk in. This numbed state may continue for days or weeks, but eventually it gives way to some kind of emotional release. Finally you were able to cry if you had not done so before. Those who are able to cry or whose families encourage them to do so are fortunate. One of the worst things a person can do is to urge a bereaved person to "be brave." You have experienced a devastating loss and will never again be the same person you were before. To deny the pain of this is to store up serious physical and emotional problems for the future. After the funeral is over and family and friends have gone, the reality of the loss begins to sink in, and one is overcome by waves of sadness and loneliness.