I’ve learned a lot of things over the last few months. How to maintain the coal stoker, how to cut firewood, how be a single parent, how to manage all the finances, how to keep it together on the outside when I’m shredded on the inside.

I’m not saying that I’m particularly good at any of these things, but I’m learning and hopefully getting better at them. But the one thing that I’ve learned that has surprised me and that I’m not getting better at is that losing someone like this and the grieving process basically causes brain damage.

I’ve been very frustrated lately, because no matter how organized I try to be, no matter how many lists I write myself, no matter how much I plan, I just can’t seem to keep up with things.

I’m a person who has always thrived on multitasking and cramming as much into a day as I can. It’s one of the reasons that Steve and I had such a successful marriage. Both of our brains were just always going.

It always struck me as funny that neither of us was content to just have one job. In addition to our full-time jobs, each of us had one or more side gigs going at all times, not to mention the full time job of parenting and running the household.

One of the things I liked best about my “real” job, was how complicated it was, and how I was required to multitask just to keep up with things. I liked that I could leave work with a problem in my head and work it around in my brain while I was running the kids or making dinner.

One of the things I have loved about having this column is that I was always ruminating on a theme for the next week, or pre-writing another idea in my head. I’d been hoping that returning to work and that routine would maybe help kick-start my brain and get it back to feeling normal again. Instead, I haven’t been able to return to my previous level of function and that has now added another level of frustration.

I had been hoping that working with the dogs and learning a new skill would help snap me out of the blahs. To an extent it did, but I seem to be stuck with the same few simple drills that I started with, and I struggle to be consistent with disciplining and rewarding them. When even the dogs are starting to look at you worriedly, it’s a clear sign that something is wrong.

During therapy, terms like post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain event got thrown around and I was reluctant to buy into them because, I don’t know, they just seemed to be bigger and more serious than what I felt was just the overwhelming sadness and emptiness I was feeling.

So many people have been through this, and although every journey is different, I was sure that someone out there had to have an answer that would help me, beyond my therapist asking me how I’d been self-caring, or queries from friends if I was “doing OK.” Thanks to the internet, I finally stumbled across the term “widow’s fog.”

I’m a trained scientist, and it’s in my nature to want to understand things from the inside out. When I can explain something, I can understand it, and when I can understand something that is broken, I can start to figure out how to fix it.

Long story and lots of technical lingo later, the short answer has to do with the prefrontal cortex of your brain, which is basically the control center of your brain. According to the website “The Widow’s Foundation,” “it is the job of your prefrontal cortex to execute rational thinking.” The website goes on to explain that the PFC is extremely limited in its capacity and can only be used successfully a few times a day. It’s one of the reasons why “sleeping on” a big decision can be a good idea, or why you seem to be sharper in the morning, and less so as the day goes on.

Any event that has strong emotions tied to it will overload the PFC. An event like the tragic, unexpected loss of a spouse, basically keeps happening repeatedly and affects every aspect of your life, causing the PFC to work overtime, without any break. Ultimately, this causes the PFC to crash and burn.

When I read this explanation (the full version on the website goes much deeper than my summary), enough of my PFC was functional to allow a little light bulb to go off. I also realized that since I’d been training my PFC to work overtime even before this happened, with my many activities and jobs, it was quite primed for an epic meltdown, which is basically where I find myself now.

I like it when things have names and explanations. It lets me know that other people out there have suffered through the same thing. And, most importantly, they’ve survived it enough to share their story.

I hope that you never have to experience “widow’s (or widower’s) fog,” or any other fog for that matter. I do find it interesting that out of all the possible loss combinations that could induce this feeling, the one they homed in on was the widow. But, if you do, perhaps knowing that this is a thing, and that it will supposedly pass, might help you, too.

Liz Pinkey is a contributing writer to the Times News.