I don't have any wisdom, just sympathy. I'm deeply sorry for your loss, and do understand what you mean when you say that trying to "detach" yourself and letting the grief "pass" feels like failing to honor your wife. In moments like these I've always felt a profound sense of responsibility, an ethical obligation really, to honor and grant dignity to those who have touched our lives, to acknowledge who they were and how they have mattered, and that their existence contributed to the well-being of the universe.
It's right that you're grieving now and in mourning for your wife. And I don't believe Buddhism is ever meant to detach you from the sadness. If anything, it may allow you to feel it more fully, to confront your own emotions without burying them, and provide a kind of safe holding space where you can come to terms with who your wife was and how you are now having loved and lost her. Things will be hard, at times they will feel almost impossible, but as long as you take it one day at a time and don't cling endlessly to the sadness (that's what Buddhism teaches us--how to feel the sadness without clinging to it or becoming crippled by it), you'll survive and become a more compassionate person throughout all this.
Life is unpredictable, and grasping for certainty is futile. But if you see things--and people--in all their beauty and impermanence, you may begin to feel a sense of calm, and even joy, in appreciating the little things, like these first years of your daughter's life which are so precious and only happen once. Just try to be there for her, especially on those days when you feel as though you can't quite manage to be there for yourself.
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