By: Jill Pertler

A year ago today I woke up being someone’s wife and went to bed a widow. My life changed forever that day. And, I guess it’s been changing ever since.

I honestly never contemplated being a widow. I don’t think many of us do. We don’t live life as though we are all potentially on the precipice of a fundamentally devastating change. We couldn’t function if we did.

So we live life one day to the next, letting them link together, like the paper chain we used to make when we were kids at Christmas. We started somewhere around Thanksgiving, when the chain reached from the ceiling al...