I am very sorry to hear of your wife’s passing. Please accept my sympathy on your loss.
It is no doubt quite an adjustment to move from married life to single life. It requires a good deal of patience and self-denial to adjust to the new boundaries on chastity that you now must observe. I beg you to stop trying to rationalize sins of impurity. Such sins do indeed hurt people. At least two, at this point: You and God. They hurt God because such sins violate his design for the act of marital relations. They hurt you because they can make you selfish, seeking only to satisfy personal urges. Should you ever remarry, they’ll hurt a future wife because such sins train you in objectifying sex. Instead of satisfying yourself, marital relations with a new wife will be degraded into mutual masturbation, in which your wife would exist to satisfy your sexual urges.
At this stage in your life, perhaps God is calling you to focus on mastering your urges, saying “no” to what you know to be a sin, and to focus your love and attention on God. In the short term, you can work on overcoming such temptations by immersing yourself in service to your family and/or community, by exercise, and by other healthy distractions. Once you have practiced at denying urges to engage in unhealthy and immoral self-gratification, perhaps you will be better able to conquer other areas of temptation in your life. Look at it this way: We hope your late wife is now with God. Think of this time as a time to prepare yourself to one day be reunited with her in heaven by denying yourself, taking up your cross, and following Christ through his Church. God bless.
