What can you offer to a surviving partner you've never met upon her loss of someone you never met ? Awkwardly enough, I can only offer this:

The man reflected in all of these posts knew enough about this odd condition we call "life" to probe it, savor it, share it, try to make it worthwhile....with a sense of play and of the comic that its absurdities require. The loss of someone that conscious and alive can take you up, change you, enable you to go on and do and share in ways (small or large) that you may not have done before. And - if and when it does - it doesn't make any of the loss go away. It just transforms it into something you can do good with. An odd sort of low-key miracle.

Doesn't work that way for everyone. Doesn't have to. There are other ways to go on. But when you've been close to someone who really did his damndest to live (or hers) it can work that way.
I know that now. And Heather, I truly hope it works out so for you.
Eventually.

- George