Thanks for sharing this.
I think the hardest part of the whole thing is maintaining the façade... smiling when all you really want to do is to curl up in a corner & expire. Every once in a while a bit of my despair starts to leak through. My wife will say: "Are you okay?" I say: "Sure. I'm just tired." Of course, I know that's not really true. I suspect she knows it as well. But it's maintains the charade.