In a candid airing of grief over Eunice Kennedy Shriver's death, California first lady Maria Shriver said Tuesday that losing her mother "has brought me to my knees."

Shriver, the wife of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, spoke about the passing of her mother and uncle, Sen. Edward Kennedy, before convening a celebrity panel on grief at the annual Women's Conference in Long Beach.

Shriver said she talked to her mother every day until Eunice Kennedy Shriver died at age 88 in August and that it has been a struggle to deal with the fact that her mother is gone.

"I go through my days trying to act incredibly normal. … I go through the motions," she said. "But every minute of every day, I can feel my broken heart."

Shriver had said little publicly about her mother's death before sharing her story Tuesday with an estimated 14,000 attendees at the Women's Conference.

"The real truth is, I'm not fine," she said. "The real truth is, my mother's death has brought me to my knees. I had feared it my entire life. I was terrified that when it actually happened, I wouldn't be able to go on."

Shriver said she notices her mother's absence at every turn. When she left the studio after appearing this month on "Meet the Press" to discuss a women's workplace study, she said she looked down at her phone to see whether her mother had called as she usually did after interviews.

"It was the first time I hadn't had a call from my mother," she said. "It was that little thing. It was like, wow, OK, new normal."

Shriver maintained some levity, noting that it was the same phone she was caught using while driving.

"I looked down at it, but I wasn't driving, I wasn't driving," she said, sparking laughter and applause. Though she plans to donate the phone to charity as an apologetic gesture for her driving mishap, she said it still contains voice mail from her mother that she can't bring herself to listen to.

Since Schwarzenegger took office, Shriver has transformed the Women's Conference from a low-key annual conference organized by California's first lady into a two-day production featuring A-list speakers.

For the panel on grief, Shriver was joined by Lisa Niemi, the widow of actor Patrick Swayze; Elizabeth Edwards, who lost her 16-year-old son Wade in 1996; and actress Susan St. James, who lost her 14-year-old son Teddy in 2004. The four women discussed how they cope with the deaths and described what the aftermath has been like in each of their situations.

Niemi suffered the most recent loss when Swayze died in September at age 57 after battling pancreatic cancer. They were married 34 years.

"The most courageous thought that I had was that I wanted to, at some point, feel like I had the courage to go on and have a good life," Niemi said. "And in the first few days after that, I felt like that would almost be a betrayal. That I would be letting him down somehow."

She said everyone told her that Swayze would have wanted her to move on, but she said in her mind it was "hard to think about that. It's a brutal truth that you have to go on without that person."

Niemi said she recently was channel surfing and noticed that "Ghost" was on television, the movie in which Swayze's character dies but then communicates to his girlfriend through a medium.

"I sat there for about 10 minutes, going, 'Do I have the courage to put it on that station?' " Niemi said. "And actually, it wasn't so bad because that was an actor playing a role, and it's different from my personal experience."

"I hadn't thought about 'Ghost,' " said Edwards, "but what an incredible … I can see why you would have some hesitation putting that one on."

Edwards and former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards lost their son Wade in a 1996 car accident. After 13 years, she said she still grieves at unpredictable moments. Just last week, she said she was talking to a young woman, glanced at a picture of Wade and then felt grief.

"Early on, it's sort of easier, almost everything is a trigger," she said. "There's music that triggers; there are particular people. But you try to turn those into good things, you try to turn those into helpful things."

Teddy Ebersol, the son of St. James and NBC Sports executive Dick Ebersol, died in 2004 when the chartered jet that he and his father were in crashed in Colorado. St. James said that after his death, she received letters from a lot of businessmen who knew her husband. One from a professional football team owner struck a chord with her.

"It said, 'You know, the thing that helped me the most is, we're not human beings having a spiritual experience, we're spiritual beings having a human experience,'" she said. "And I could picture Teddy as a spiritual being and then coming down on Earth, having these 14 cool years and then going home."

Shriver likewise described a spiritual experience that she said helped her deal with her grief. She said that on Aug. 15, four days after her mother's death, she walked along the beach in Hyannisport, Mass.

Shriver said she saw a woman wearing a long, dark skirt and a black cross. The woman said she was a former nun who once worked for Mother Teresa and that she had driven from Boston to give Shriver "holy cards" for her and her four brothers.

Shriver said she looked up and the woman was gone. She had walked into the ocean fully dressed.

"I started running right at her," Shriver said. " 'Who are you? Who sent you here?' "

"The woman looked at me, and she looked at me right in the eye, and she said, 'Your mother and the Virgin Mary sent me here,'" Shriver said. "I burst into tears."

Shriver said the woman explained Aug. 15 was the Feast of the Assumption and that an old Irish proverb says that on Aug. 15 that you are supposed to go into the water.

"So I took this former nun's hand, and in my clothes and in my shoes, I walked right into the water," Shriver said.

Call Kevin Yamamura, Bee Capitol Bureau, (916) 326-5548.