Losing a partner is a huge and catastrophic loss, and with it come a whole battery of secondary losses. This includes a loss of confidence and a loss of who we feel we are.
 
Losing confidence in yourself
By taking away the person who was closest to us, bereavement can affect our sense of self, our self-esteem and our view of who we are. It takes our past, our present and our future, and leaves us feeling as if the carpet has been pulled out from under our feet.
 
Losing confidence in your grief
Early on in my grief I lots confidence in my ability to grieve. Was I grieving too much or too little? Later on down the road some days I thought I was getting over him too quickly, and other days I thought I was taking too long to move forward.
 
Losing confidence in your health
When we lose someone that we are close to, it of course leaves us grieving. It can also remind us of our own health and mortality. This can turn into health anxiety, which is worrying too much about whether you are seriously ill or are going to become seriously ill. It can affect your day-to-day life.
 
Losing confidence in the world
The death of our partners, especially when it is sudden and unexpected, can erode our confidence in how the world works. If something that catastrophic can happen without warning, what's to stop all manner of other things happening. This can leave us with a loss of hope, depression and
A feeling that life isn't worth living any more.
 
Dealing with loss of confidence

• Be patient with yourself – grieving takes time. As our grief changes over the weeks, months and years, so our confidence in ourselves and the world can begin to come back
• Talk to people who understand grief – there are groups on the resources page
• Look after yourself by eating as well as you can and doing any exercise that you feel able to do
• Do things that you enjoy, alone or with others – anything from reading a good book on the sofa to joining a walking group, finding a choir, or going wild swimming
• If your lack of confidence or your anxiety affects your every day life, consider grief counselling, cognitive behavioural therapy or psychotherapy

​In February 2015, after seven years and two bouts of cancer, my fabulous wife Mandy died and my world turned upside down.
 
She looked after the house; she looked after my kids and I. She loved me and I couldn't see how I could live without her. It wasn't until I was a few months down the line that I realised how much this was true.

A few months after Tim died, I started to pick myself up and get back on with life. I was still heartbroken, but things started to return to, if not normal, a 'new normal'. I went back to work quite soon because as a freelancer I didn't have a lot of choice, and it gave me a structure to my week. However, I found that at around six or seven months, it felt like I'd gone right back to the very beginning. My mental health took a nose dive, I cried all the time, and I had to pull out of two major work projects.
 
Looking back at how I felt at six months, I think that was the point that the shock wore off and the reality kicked in. I was angry at him for dying and for leaving me so much to sort out. I was lonely. I had widow's fire but was too broken and felt too guilty to do anything about it. And the combination widow brain, depression and ADHD meant that my concentration was messed up.
 
The only way I could get though it was to go back to my early coping strategies – grounding, writing, talking to people in the grief and widow community and taking care of myself. 

​I sometimes feel like I'm living two parallel lives. The one where Tim is still alive. The one where the what ifs weren't ifs. The one where I loved only him. And then there's the one that I am in now, without Tim but with my wonderful wife Dee.

​This new relationship started about three and a half years after Tim died. Last year Dee and I got married, and we are about to buy a house together.
 
I still love Tim. I always will. But I also love Dee. And I don't think that's a problem. The way I look at it, is – I have a cat. Dee arrived with two dogs and a cat. I didn't stop loving my cat because new animals arrived – I simply love them all. I am the youngest of five siblings, but my parents didn't say "we can only love the first child", their love expanded for all of us. In the same way, I can love Tim, but I can also love Dee, and my love for her is no less for that. Love isn't like a piece of pie that is cut up into slices, it's infinite like the universe. 

As widows, we should be proud of ourselves. We have got through some of the worst possible experiences.

Be proud of what you have achieved today.

Today may be a bad day, and if it is, be proud that you are still here. You have survived another day.

Today may be a okay day. Be proud that you are clean and are drinking tea (other beverages are available).

Today may be a good day. Be proud of looking after yourself, looking after other people, going to work, shopping, acting, singing, creating something, changing your life, changing the world.

​Whatever you have done, however small, however huge, you did it. Be proud. I'm proud of you.

I've never been very good at asking for help – even as a kid I would say "I can manage it on my own". When I was widowed, I hated asking for help even more.

Sometimes I just couldn't frame what I was asking for because I was so low. Sometimes I didn't want to face people. But sometimes it was pride – I was ashamed that I couldn’t do it on my own. It was also pride that I didn't want to ask people into the house. It was a mess – because of the amount of stuff there was, because I wasn't looking after it and myself, because I didn't have time as I threw myself so deeply into work as a way to cope.

Slowly, I learned that it really is okay to ask for help, and that there is no shame in asking. That helping makes people feel good, and it helps them to grieve too. And that refusing help can mean that people don't offer to help you, or others, in the future. I still don't find it easy, and I can be clumsy in asking, but I am a little better at it now.

Hearing "what can I do", especially in those first few blurred days and weeks, is such a hard question to answer. One of the most useful suggestions from a friend when Tim died was to get a pad of sticky notes and a pen and to write down what I needed help with, and stick the note up on the wall. Then when people asked, I could just direct them to the wall.

, and that's bittersweet.​Things have been quiet here for a while. And it's… complicated. Just as I was settling down for Christmas, I got flu. Thankfully it wasn't as bad as it could have been, as I'd been vaccinated, but it wiped out Christmas and a couple of weeks afterwards.
 
I've been having a lot of work done on the house. It's very old (potentially one of the oldest in the village) and everything went wrong at once. A ceiling needed repairing. A section of roof needed replacing. Damp needed sorting.
 
Over Christmas, my wife and I decided that it was time to think about buying somewhere together, as she has been living in what was mine and Tim's house. This was a tough decision for me, but it is the right thing to do. It's part of moving forward, and Tim will come to the new house with me. Because he is always there. As part of this process, I'm selling Tim's books, and that's bittersweet.
 
February was the five-year anniversary of Tim's death, but also the day I discovered that Tim's father was dying. And so I've been to another funeral.
 
And finally – I have ADHD. This makes me very easily distracted. And all of the above have been pretty distracting. But I am now back. Thank you for bearing with me.

On the day of the anniversary of Tim's death in February, I rang Tim's mum. I always do. But as soon as she answered, I knew that something else was wrong. They were at their local hospital, and Tim's dad was having a scan. It was the end of a story that had started around Christmas, when they noticed that he was losing weight. It was pancreatic cancer. It was terminal, and he didn't want any visitors. A couple of weeks later, I had the phone call to say that this gentle, funny, glorious, intelligent and talented man had died in his sleep.
Yesterday I went to his funeral. A tender, peaceful celebration led by a wonderful celebrant, and a few hours of talking to people I last saw at Tim and my wedding, and Tim's funeral. I spent the evening with a fellow widow, who just gets it.
​
A week before I went to the funeral of my cousin's son – my first cousin once removed – and it was another celebration of a gentle, funny, glorious, intelligent and talented man.

I've found that each new grief brings back the old griefs again. Funerals are a time to celebrate the people we lose, but I'd quite like a while without one.
​

Tim was a bookseller and a collector, and when he died the house was full of books, magazines, motor racing programmes, Airfix kits and model cars. I cleared the house and sold the magazines, cars and Airfix kits, but I was left with the books. These are things that were particularly special to him, collected over a lifetime and loved, and each has a memory associated with it that I don't have access to. Where he bought the book. The things he read from it. The people he showed it to. He always said he wanted them to be my income if anything happened, and now the time is right for me to sell his books.

I'm listing the books on eBay, and it's hard. I'm getting flashbacks. Good ones, but still unsettling. Getting a book collection in from another dealer and opening the boxes as if it was Christmas. Wandering round car boot sales. Going to Le Mans and stocking up from the racecourse shop. Hearing his stories as we walked around the paddocks at Goodwood revival. It's good that they are going to people who love them, but it's a bittersweet process.