Journalist Lynn Sherr is grieving the husband she lost to lymphoma in 1992. It's taken her many years to fully appreciate how his death affects her and while she once felt pressure from well-intentioned, clueless friends who urged her to move on, Sherr is now completely peaceful about her on-going, long-term grieving process. In fact, she fully plans on grieving -- for the man whose ashes still sit in her lingerie drawer -- for the rest of her life.

Sherr writes in her new memoir, Outside the Box, that it was during an interview with a pioneering psychiatrist about the agony of loss when she made her stunning revelation about grief. It's when she realized she would never fully recover from grief, that it is just fine to never fully recover.

Grieving individuals do not always follow the standard stages of denial, anger, and acceptance. Yet they often feel forced into these boxes by medical professionals, family, and friends who try to move them along and consider them abnormal if they don't get on with life in a set amount of time. But each person's pattern of grief is as unique as each person's pattern of love -- and stages and boxes just don't work. Sherr's breakthrough moment came at the exact moment she learned this.

"Bingo! I didn't have to follow anyone's pattern," she writes. "I didn't have to stop being sad. Not only was sadness okay, it was necessary. Nobody can tell you how to mourn. And it's not self-indulgent; it's not wallowing; it's hanging on to something important. We should not avoid bereavement. We should embrace it, welcoming our moments of sorrow as a time to reconnect with the person we've lost."

Sherr reconnects with her husband every chance she gets. He was her best friend, her deepest love, her soul mate, her pal. And she doesn't plan to move on -- ever -- from the sadness that keeps them connected.