Does dying less than two months after birth count?

My wife gave birth to my second son in February of this year. A month later, she had a stroke in the middle of the night. A week after that, the doctors identified stage IV cancer metastasized to her liver as the root cause of the stroke, and two weeks after diagnosis she was gone.

Everybody tells me I'm strong for going through this, being at her bedside the entire time, continuing to take care of my family. But I ask, what is the alternative? If it were just me and my wife, no kids involved, I could go crawl into a bottle and come up for air in a year (or never). But that's not an option when I have my boys to take care of. Maybe it's cliched to say they're my entire reason for existing right now (don't worry, I'm not suicidal), but that's close enough to be the truth.

I know in time things will dull and fade, and I will go on with my life. But I see so much of my wife in my boys that I know she'll never be far away. I'm not religious, so I don't mean that in a "guardian angel" sense. But just physical things. My two year old sits exactly the same way my wife did, with his lower legs twisted out rather than in (think of the legs making a W, with the crotch at the point in the middle, the two inside strokes being thighs, the bottom points being knees, and the two outside strokes being lower legs). My nearly three month old looks exactly like my wife's baby pictures, and even though he got my eye color, he got her eye shape (if that makes any sense).

I don't resent my kids, even though the second one's pregnancy hid all the signs of cancer that if we caught earlier maybe could have saved my wife's life (at the cost of my son, since you can't do chemo while pregnant). But you can't go down that path. You take what you have, you love the ever living fuck out of those boys, and you do everything you can to make sure they have some sense of who their mother was as they grow up, because she can't be there with them anymore to show them first hand.