This is profoundly hard, and I'm sorry. I'll be thinkin' about ya, even though that's worth nothing. Men are extremely selfish when it comes to sexual opportunity - they have almost no respect for other men who they are not close with. Unless that man exists to put respect in them, they'll start to circle. You do not want anything to do with a man that tries to vulture a widow. Really. The difficulty you are going through will change with time. There are a lot of hard days ahead, and there's nothing - just fucking nothing - that causes things to change except for time. The memories will always be there, and there will be a latent sense of his absence, but the only way I can describe it from the point of view of grief I've faced, is that the nature of the memories and the grief changes somehow. The love never goes away, but the hurt loses that edge that right now cuts you deep each time you recall it. It stops doing that. You accept. As a man whose father died when he was young, your kids will never think of you as not being their mother. They didn't lose their mother. I know this because I know what it made me think about my own mother. She was a mom who took on more roles and more responsibility, and it engendered my siblings and I with a profound respect for her. Seriously, you're super fucking important to them, and more than you realize. You're really needed. Someday when your children are older, and they have children of their own and they can begin to imagine it, there'll be a moment it really hits each one of them how tremendous it is that you've handled yourself the way you did all those years. Toughness does not equal masculinity. It might sound cheesy, but think Ellen Ripley. She was tough, but still very feminine. Just keep moving. If you need to put your face in a pillow and scream, do it. If you need to take a drive around the block, and scream, do it. Stay in close contact and open yourself up to people that are close to you, if you have them. Your parents. His. Your close friends. If you need a night to yourself, ask for it. I found that a person's adaptive programs kick in, and you get by for weeks or months at a time by, more or less, pushing things under, but at increments there will come days that it all has to come out. You have to honor those times, and let it come out. I think the six month mark is an important time - at least it was for me. It's like that is when I really began to process things and some of my worst nights happened. A word of advice. Don't seek solace in the bottle. It will make your life exponentially harder, and as a medicine it is only 'good' till dawn anyway. And it's never actually good. Keep moving.