Picking up the Pieces and Reassembling Them

Many people undergo shattering losses like ours, events that divide their lives into Before and After, events that change them from people who thought of themselves as fortunate to people who may continue to fortunate in many respects, but who have lost someone precious and important to them.
The challenge is to go on, not as before, certainly, but not to collapse and give up on life. We gradually pick up the pieces and put them back together. But what we reconstruct can't possibly be the same as what we were before - unless we live in denial, the other side of collapse.
The loss leaves the problems and difficulties one had before the loss intact. If I was neurotic with conflicted emotions about aspects of my life - and who is not? - that's unchanged, perhaps exacerbated by bereavement. Except that maybe one gains a certain perspective: how can I worry about being a few kilos overweight when my son has fallen to his death in Peru?
The imperative is three-fold: (1) dealing with the grief, which means (2) being kind to oneself (though I don't know how I would handle that if I had been responsible for Asher's death through negligence), and (3) reconstructing oneself and one's life.
The moral imperative, if one chooses to recognize it and is capable of responding to it, connected with any life experience is to use it to become a better person. Can it make me a more loving, compassionate person? The other direction is to become selfish: such a terrible thing happened to me, that I'm allowed to do anything! Being "kind" to oneself with a vengeance.
Something in me rebels against using the terrible thing that happened to Asher to improve myself, to benefit by it in any way. However, I realize that's a silly response. Any possible gain is totally offset by the loss, if one can quantify this sort of thing.
Those of us who have lost loved ones - and by a certain age, that category becomes universal - live on, as it were, with a constant undertone of sadness. But one needn't wear it on one's sleeve like a black armband.
I've decided to maintain a separate blog for things unconnected with the topic of our loss, the way I relate to people who don't know about it - but is anything really unconnected?