Whether or not it died of natural causes is immaterial. What you have to do is grasp the fact that it really is dead and it’s never coming back – that’s the trick! Now it’s time to move on with your own life.

Say out loud “I am Divorced. I am now single” and get used to saying it often – especially in company. Don’t ever say to yourself or with friends “it’s not yet final, the paperwork isn’t completed, and they may yet come to their senses and return to me” because that’s never going to happen.

Stop looking at the door and don’t hover over the phone. Stop pumping your kids and relatives for information about your ex because it upsets and alienates them from you and any update you do receive is dead data.

Your marriage is dead and buried and it’s not going to rise up from the grave. Get used to that fact. You can’t fix it because it’s not broken – it’s dead! When something recently dies, it’s not just slightly dead; there are no degrees here, it’s just dead: fully, absolutely and completely. It is totally dead. This is where that old term about flogging a dead horse refers.

In some respects it is so similar to a physical death. There is no body – just the body of evidence! There is no grave, no burial ground, and no urn containing ashes. Thank goodness – that’s the last thing you need.

As with the death of a person some people sit around at the wake or the funeral saying why did this have to happen, and why me and so on. However, playing Sherlock Holmes or doing a post mortem on the late marriage won’t help. Playing could’ve, would’ve, should’ve won’t help. You will discover that the best thing you can possibly do is to get busy getting on with your new and single life.

Death and Divorce are similar in so many ways. The grief and grieving processes that we experience at the death of a loved one, we will also experience at the death of a marriage. We grieve for a lost love, for the loss of a family and all that was familiar. We certainly grieve for the loss of our comfort zone. Most of all, we grieve for ourselves because we feel like the child being made to wear a dunce’s cap and stand in the corner. We feel as though we have been stripped bare and are now feeling extremely raw and on display to the public at large and it hurts like hell!

Allow yourself to grieve and mourn the loss of your marriage – you are human after all. But don’t turn sorrow and self pity into your new hobby. Although there is no deadline (no pun intended) to grief – and everyone’s coping skills are different - try to keep it as short as possible. We are blessed in that the mind knows what it needs: it will unceasingly deal with its data until it finally finds acceptance and moves on. That’s where you want to be – ready to write a new chapter of your life.

Because we are human, we are really relationship reliant: friend, lover, family member, whatever. When that close and/or long standing relationship ends – especially through the signing of Court documents – we feel violated, lonely, sad and scared. We curl up into a ball and lick our wounds; and it takes us a while to heal.

The words Divorce and Single are not dirty words of which to be ashamed. They are words of freedom, and liberation. They speak of freshness and new beginnings. They have modern-world honesty about them.

Just as the caterpillar dies and makes way for the beautiful butterfly – maybe from the death of your marriage, something quite wonderful will follow in its wake.

So when you’re told ‘It’s over – get used to it’ maybe it’s because of what might be waiting for you on the other side.

Either way, its life but it won’t hang around for you. It is what it is – you’re divorced – deal with it.

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