TY and mine in return for your and your kids' loss.
To be sure, losing one's spouse or parent is never easy, and no matter knowing such is proximately imminent and being prepared, so one thinks, one isn't ever ready for it to happen.
I suppose, as with everything else, one has to look for the bright sides in order to move past the travail. In my family's case, the "bright side" is that my oldest kids (I have four) learned emotional resilience at very ages, and all of them have benefitted from having multiple "mother figures" in their lives, thus obtaining a wide variety of outlooks, approaches, etc. to making their way through maturation and discovering who they are as individuals. For myself, my wife's passing pushed me, out of financial necessity, to drive my career to levels I really never thought I could, wanted to or would. It also made me a far more involved parent than I'd, prior to her passing, thought I would be -- when we started our family, I'd envisioned myself as the present yet slightly aloof father as was my own. That unanticipated involvement brought me much closer to my kids and has given me boundless moments of joy that, had my wife lived, I may never have experienced.
Of course, in the early years after my wife died, none of us were aware of the "bright side." All we knew was that we wished she was still with us.
