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.

I've never had a problem with crying. My tears of joy and sorrow have always flowed easily, and I have never regretted shedding any one of them. I once told a college student I mentored who was hesitant to cry over a work-related scenario that I cry all the time. She later told me my confession sticks in her mind -- my ability and willingness to cry freely, without reservation. I told her I consider crying a cleansing, therapeutic process. I told her that I always feel replenished after a good cry. And I still believe this, years and years after my encounter with this student.

I cried just a few days ago while talking to my doctor and then my mom about how cancer may prevent me from having another child, if not physically, then emotionally. I just don't know if I could peacefully experience a pregnancy with the fear of cancer recurrence. And this makes me cry. Because I want another child. But I don't think I will have one. I cried at my oncologist appointment the other day while talking about the death of a friend. I cry while reading certain books and while watching sad movies and television shows. Two nights ago, I cried while watching Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, about a breast cancer survivor. I cry when recalling the births of my babies and while marveling at my little growing boys. And I know I will cry when I read a journal a friend just shared with me, written by his uncle who lost a daughter to brain cancer.

Tears cleanse my soul. And sometimes, they complicate matters. They make me wonder how well I am, two years after my cancer diagnosis. I interpret my tears now more than ever, in an effort to determine how well I am coping with life in survival mode. I wonder if the tears that frequently well up in my eyes are normal or if they are indicative of the depression that prompted my oncologist to prescribe an anti-depressant. I consider that perhaps I should be better able to handle some topics, some situations, some tough experiences without becoming weepy. And I also realize that perhaps my tears are completely normal, that I could be ultra sensitive to my every emotion, that as long as I feel happy and function easily, I am just fine.

I plan to iron all this out at my next and final counseling session that I need to schedule. This closing session will allow me to wrap up two year's worth of cancer issues, to close one chapter of my life and begin another. I just need to make the appointment. Which I have yet to do. Because contemplating the end of something so healing seems so daunting. And for better or for worse, this makes me cry.