I think the first thing is to realise that we all feel like this.
It's crazy really how self-inflicted grief is and how strong the tendency is to beat yourself up.
I think when you lose someone very dear to you that sense of loss gets you thinking what you could have done differently - firstly to have stopped it happening and then to have made their passing better or the last days/weeks better.
To give you an ide of how messed up this can get - After my wife died I found myself working back in dates and thinking could the cancer have started during the holday we had in Greece? was there something in the flight that could have triggered it? - total nonsense of course but it's how the mind works.
Christmas 2014 was her last and her life expectancy was less than 6 months then and there were some familly stresses with kids not wanting to do familly things and she felt a bit let down that it wasn't the perfect familly Christmas from the Movies for what might be (and was as it turned out her last Christmas) and occasionally I think that too.
She also wanted to get a last holiday in despite not getting insurance. She didn't think it would matter if she died abroard - I guess to her it wouldn't have! I also sometimes regret not giving in to that but if she had actually have died abroad or got badly ill without insurance it would have been a nightmare.
What I'm trying to say is in these circumstances we all take these things and blow them out of proportion.
When someone becomes terminally ill there's a tendency to think how every second must be lived to the complete fullest but real life still happens - bills need paying, clothes need ironing dishes need washing. The world doesn't stop.
Even if you could have done things differently that's past now, things have moved on and this way of thinking is just hurting you, nobody benefits. It's like people who self-harm cutting themselves to punish themselves for some imagined fault - but a mental version.
I'm pretty sure your wife wouldn't have wanted you to spend so much time beating yourself up about this even if you did do the ironing - I think she'd have forgiven you by now don't you?
Maybe that's what you need to do when you start thinking like that - stop and think - yes maybe, but we all make mistakes and it's over now - she forgave me time for me to do the same
