I don't know if this helps, but it is something that was said to me, and it really helped. I belong to a women's group, and in that group, there is a woman who lost her son at the age of 20. About 2 years after my daughters were diagnosed, I was still experiencing these sudden fits of sadness and tears, and I was berating myself for not being able to 'move on.' My friend helped me understand that what I was feeling was grief, not grief at the death of a child, as she had experienced, but grief at the loss of an idea I had about my children's future (which had never included CF). Talking to her helped me understand that grief is cyclical, and it is not something that goes away. CF brings a sadness into our lives, and that grief becomes part of who we are. We learn to live with it, and maybe even, in time, use it. Most days now, it is in the background for me, but I know it is there, and there are issues that can still bring it to the surface. But for me it really helped to also accept it as something was now a part of me. It was only then that I could stop fighting it and learn how to live in a healthy way with it. That took time. In the meantime, I gave myself permission to sometimes tell my girls I needed some quiet time when it hit me, and I let myself go into the bathroom to cry it out.
The other thing my friend said that helped was to stop expecting grief to be logical. That helped, because like you, I felt like I needed to control my tears. Yet sometimes a thought would hit me at the most unexpected or inappropriate moment, and I would start to cry. I remember several times that I had to race across the parking lot at work, or down the hall to my office, because I was hit with a sudden wave of tears.
Grief is a process, and it takes time -- time in the measure of years, not months -- and the only way through it is to let yourself feel it. What you are feeling is as normal as it is horrible to have to face. For me, it was also lonely, because my husband and I grieved very differently. But it did get easier.
