I was busy yesterday but I'm back.
Grief isn't something we can avoid, we must go through it, whether we want to or not. Ultimately it's better to experience the emotions that grief brings with it than to deny them. If we deny them, then the emotions we try to suppress will come out in other ways which we cannot control and often will bring with them the sort of experiences we are least equipped to deal with.
Despite this, grief is a process we all navigate in a similar way. The first stage is denial, where we feel numb, and our loss feels unreal. In the next stage, as we begin to experience the emotional and practical effects of our loss, it becomes real and unleashes a flood of emotions including anger.
The next two stages often happen together but include 'bargaining' where we try to swerve the cause of their grief, and low mood, where everything feels pointless. Finally, we move on to accepting what's happened, has happened and weave the story of the person we've lost into the tapestry of our own life.
Something I should underline here is your grief experience is extremely complicated thanks to factors like your family's attitude to emotions, you being trans, their attitude to that and to your relationship, the circumstances of the loss of your partner and you having her child to care for.
This is not a situation we should be fooling around with, full stop. Empathy and understanding yes, answers to questions, yes, we can do that, but you really, really should seek a bereavement therapist. Even with my professional hat on, I would be wary of dealing with this online, but equally, if you can get face to face therapy, I'm certain you can navigate this because you've unpicked your grief enough to get a head start with a therapist.
