I started to read this column expecting to have great sympathy for the writer, but by the time it was over I just wanted to give her a good shake and tell her to get over it.  She seems to be offended by everything.  People say "I'm sorry" and she has to put a negative spin to it.  So what if they never knew your husband?  Does that mean they can't be sorry for your loss or sorry that they have inadvertanly provoked your sensitivities.  I too suffered through the long illness and death of my significant other.  Being gay we didn't have the privalage of having our names and business affairs as entwined as the author's and her husbands.  Yet I still spent years fielding the occasional phone calls and dealing with various business loose ends.  Never once have I felt put upon or abused because someone made me think about him.  It would never occur to me to blame some poor clerk in a store for bringing up something he couldn't possibly know I would be sensitive about.  

Your husband is dead and I know that pain and lonliness all too well (as Joni Mitchell put it "the bed's too big - the frying pan's too wide), but after three years this extreme sensitivity is more about self pity than about grief.  

Ms. Romagnoli, your husband must have died about the same time that mine did.  And like you, I still feel the pain at having to explain that he is no longer here.  Unlike the other poster, who has experienced a devastating loss that seems to include losing compassion for others, I understand that there is no timetable.  It is what it is.  What my journey has taught me, is that after a while it gets a little less painful.  My heart still yearns, but the pain is now being replaced more and more by a profound appreciation for all that he meant to me, to our sons, to his colleagues at work, and to a legion of friends, whose memories of him remain bright and powerful.