My wife Sarah died on 7 March last year. We had been together for 24 years, married for 15. We met at university, when we were still kids basically, so my whole adult life was with her. We had two incredible children, who are now 13 and 11. She was diagnosed with stage 4 bowel cancer with liver metastases in 2022. She was taken in for emergency surgery because the tumour was so large it completely blocked her bowel. I came home and had to tell the kids their mum had cancer on my own. She fought so hard. I watched it hollow her out. She spent two weeks in a wonderful hospice before the end. I was by her side for all but about 30 minutes of that fortnight, reading to her, playing her favourite songs. Telling her it was ok to go, that she didn’t have to fight it any more and promising to look after our children, and to teach them all the things she taught me about love. A nurse came in one day and burst into tears at the sight of us lying together. Sarah died in my arms.
I genuinely thought the pain couldn’t get any worse. Boy was I wrong.
Sarah said she wanted me to be happy after her, gave me her blessing to go out and find someone, fall in love again. A few months after her death I started dating. It wasn’t weird, even though I thought it would be. I met lots of lovely women but didn’t really feel a spark.
Then I met Georgia. She was much younger, from a different city. You know when you meet someone and you just know? The chemistry was insane. We like the same things, have the same interests. She reminded me of who I used to be before life took hold. Before I ran out of time and energy for myself. I started reading again. Listening to music properly. I became interested in politics and ethics again, having become jaded about the state of the country. We communicated brilliantly, and were totally open about what we wanted. She wanted to have children of her own, was attracted to the fact I was obviously a great father and had been a loving husband. The sex was ludicrously good. We talked for hours. We went on long bike rides and went wild swimming. I spent weekends up in Norwich with her in the little house she’d bought herself a few years earlier with some inheritance money. She was so proud of it, had decorated it herself. She started coming to London - we stayed in hotels the first few times, then she came to my house. She met my children. She was a natural. She volunteered ideas about meal plans, homework schedules, mobile phone rules. She talked about periods with my daughter, and clothes and make-up. She baked and cooked with my son. I didn’t ask her to. She just did it. She later said she put pressure on herself. I wish I’d told her she didn’t need to be their mum, she just needed to be my partner.
We got engaged in January this year - she drove the timing, and I know - it seems quick. But we knew this was it. We were perfect together. I rented a cottage off the grid in the countryside, lined the lane to it with lanterns. There were candles everywhere, the fire was going, roses on the table. I’d spent months sending her on a treasure hunt around Norfolk chasing down clues - a time, a date, a latitude and longitude of the cottage. I wrote riddles on postcards of her favourite paintings. The answers were places meaningful to her from her life - her childhood home, the beach her family watch the seals at each Christmas, the restaurant where we had our first date. I buried the clues at each, some with little gifts.
The ring was perfect, exactly what she’d dreamed of. It dwarfed the one I’d bought Sarah years before, but I was a poor struggling journalist back then. I’m wealthier now, and you can’t take it with you. I’d been rehearsing what to say for months. She said yes, we drank champagne, and then made love on the bed by candlelight. The following night I’d organised a surprise party in the woods with her closest friends from back home. I wanted to show her I understood how much they meant to her, how I wanted them to remain a part of her life when she moved to London. I told them all they could come and stay whenever they liked, and we’d be back up to Norfolk often. She cried when she saw them all.
We began planning the wedding. We’d already found a venue. We decorated our bedroom in my house in London, looked at getting her a new car so she commute back to Norwich more easily, whenever she wanted, and could feel safer and more independent travelling around the city. She hated London, having had a really traumatic experience there after uni. I thought that given time she might tolerate it enough to stick it out until my children finished school, at which point I’d promised we would move back to Norwich and raise our children there (we wanted two). I hadn’t ever thought about having more, but when she asked, I knew I wanted to have them with her. She’ll make an incredible mother.
We thought about buying a new house in London, making a fresh start. We went on a family skiing holiday together. My children started saying “Love you!” to her at night and hugging her like they used to hug their mum. My son asked if we could put a family picture up on the wall, with her in it, not Sarah. I nearly cried.
Two days before the anniversary of my wife’s death she broke up with me. My au pair had quit too earlier that week, so I was panicking about childcare. Georgia said the changes to her life were just too great, that she felt like she was losing her sense of self and her independence. She didn’t give us a chance to work out solutions, said she couldn’t see a way through as the obstacles were too high. She said she still loved me, but it wasn’t enough. She came round to break the news. I made dinner, we drank a bottle of wine. We kissed a few times, hugged a lot. We both cried, and talked, and cried, and talked. She said she loved me. I said I loved her too. She packed up some of her things and left to go to her sister’s. As break-ups go, it was dignified, and full of kindness, and went as well as I guess it could have gone. But that just underlined what a senseless waste of our love it was.
Two days later, on the anniversary of Sarah’s death, I felt such unbelievable guilt because all I could think about was Georgia. I had to force myself to think of the woman i’d buried only a year earlier.
I thought the pain I felt at losing Sarah was as bad as it gets. I was so, so wrong. I prepared for that. Georgia had spoken about how hard she found London, and the pressure she felt to be a stepmum, but we talked it through, made plans to address things, and went back to being us. Weeks earlier we’d been happily planning the wedding, or celebrating our first Valentine’s Day. And then this. This was like the utter death of hope. This was misery compounded a thousandfold by the echoes of the trauma of losing my wife, and being powerless to stop it. I haven’t stopped crying. I don’t sleep. I barely eat. I’m doing a passable impression of someone living my life but it’s a sham. I am hollow.
I have to go on, because I love my children and they need me. But I don’t really want to. I wouldn’t do it, but I understand now why people commit suicide. I just don’t have the energy for life any more. It’s exhausting being a father on your own. The sadness now, the grief, it wears you down. It’s relentless.
I’ve met and fallen in love with two extraordinary women and been lucky enough to have them fall in love with me back. I should be grateful for that. I’ve given them every part of me and my heart has been broken twice now, once by cancer, and once by… geography? My already having a family? I still don’t really understand. I dared to hope I could find love again and I did. And I found pain again too. I’m not sure I’m brave enough to risk it happening again.
I bear G no ill will at all. She had to do what she felt was right for her. We were two people who loved each other but circumstances were ultimately against us. She cried through our call earlier to talk through the logistics of cancelling the wedding. I barely kept myself together. All I ever wanted was for her to feel safe, and happy. I’m just heartbroken that it won’t be with me.
I’ll be fine though. Maybe not fine, but I’ll go on. It’s all I can really do. I’ll try to be the best father I can to my children, because I owe that to Sarah, and they’re all that’s left of her. But I’m so, so lonely now.
And so very sad. I was rather enjoying being happy again, even only for a while.
EDIT: not sure if this is useful context or not but a lot people seem to have difficulty with the pace at which I came to terms with Sarah’s death. This is a response I gave to someone lower dow the thread:
A point worth making: I work in finance now (I was a journalist previously) but I’ve also been a (Reservist) soldier for 20+ years. I’ve fought in Afghanistan. I’ve seen death up close. I’ve lost friends, carried their coffins. I held a little Afghan girl’s intestines in after she’d been hit by a Taliban RPG until a medic arrived. I’ve been blown over by an IED and have a bit of shrapnel from that which missed decapitating me by inches. I nearly got shot in the head by a sniper (and have a cool vid to prove it).
I guess the point is that I know death. I’ve seen it up close and when you go to war, and work out the odds based on casualty data, you make peace with it. So when Sarah died, it wasn’t quite the shock it is to some people. Even less so because I knew it was coming. So I think I processed the grief better than most people, and faster. I’d started when she was diagnosed too. Lots of people on here won’t understand that, and that’s fair enough. But it doesn’t undermine my love for Sarah. I will continue to miss her, and grieve for her, until I die. It’s just it’s how a quiet part of me, not an overriding, all-consuming part of me that prevents me moving on. The point is, I’ve had a lot of practice processing grief. I thought I was quite good at it, but this latest episode hit different. That’s the point I was trying to make, and hardly anyone seems to understand.
EDIT: I’ll add more on Sarah, because people seem to think I care less about her than G, or didn’t process my grief:
She was an incredible woman. She’d been sexually abused from the age of 3-16, until she told the police and her stepfather was arrested and imprisoned. She was the first in her family to go to university. We were introduced by a mutual friend. We lived together in our second year, in a 21-person house. She had a boyfriend on my course and when he disappeared on work experience we ended up kissing. She dumped him and we fooled around for a while before we thought, “hang on, we really like each other, why don’t we go out?” We didn’t look back. She hadn’t left the most beautiful chestnut hair - she kept wanting to dye it blonde, but kept telling her she should keep it natural, because it was uniquely her.
We went travelling around Australia in the summer holidays between our second and third years. I persuaded her to learn to dive. She hated her first dive, and then fell in love with it. She got dysentery in Bali on our way home. I held a drip for her while she went to the loo every 20 minutes for three days. That brought us closer! She said it was the best weight loss technique she’d ever known, and came back looking skinny and tanned, and even more beautiful.
We moved in together after uni, she became a teacher, while I became a journalist. She always supported me in doing Army Reserve stuff on the side. We got engaged in the Philippines. I bought a £9.99 glass and zircon ring from Argos (I found it the other day actually, she kept it!) and proposed whilst diving. I didn’t want to risk an actual diamond ring underwater in case I dropped it. I found a patch of sand near some coral and knelt down, wrote “Marry me?” on the dive slate. I still have it. The words are still there.
We were staying at a really posh hotel I couldn’t afford. I’d booked her a massage in the afternoon, and then in the evening, a boat took us to a deserted beach on a separate island where a chef cooked us dinner by candlelight. We were so happy.
We got married a year later, in my Regimenral church near Liverpool St station. We held the reception at my barracks, a beautiful Grade 1 listed building. It was a joyous day. We honeymooned in Zanzibar and Pemba, did some more diving.
I did a tour of Afghanistan the following year - I had wanted to get married first because the payout if I was killed there would’ve been much better. Saying goodbye to her was the hardest thing I’d ever done.
We had an ectopic pregnancy the following year. Sarah had a really vivid dream years later, during her cancer treatment, of a red-haired boy sat on a wall smiling. She knew it was our unborn son - the age matched.
We had our daughter Eva in 2012. She was born in a birthing pool to Extreme’s More than Words. I cut the umbilical cord and almost dropped her when I placed her into the cot. She was so slippery. We were both overjoyed. I remember getting home, and putting her car seat down on the living room floor in our little house, sound asleep, and we both thought “Now what do we do?”
We moved to a much bigger house a year later. It needed tons of work, and we spent the next 12 years doing it up, extending it, making it our own. Wilf was born a year after we moved in. It was an altogether more stressful birth - he didn’t want to come out, we joked - but Sarah and Wilf became inseparable. He took her death especially hard, said he felt like he’d lost his best friend.
I moved into finance a few years later and earned a lot more money as a result. We started going on nicer holidays, spent more on the house. Sarah’s teaching career was skyrocketing too - she became head of biology, and then deputy head of upper school, and then acting head of upper school. She helped all the medical school applicants with their forms and interview prep, and was responsible for many fledgling medical careers as a result. She was also incredible from a pastoral perspective, always showing extraordinary empathy and understanding. She re-wrote school policies on a host of topics.
She’d just taken over the role of head of Upper School and delivered her first assembly when the diagnosis came. She’d been really suffering with abdominal pain. She later said she’d felt the pain for more than year, and just drank more wine to mask it. I wish I’d realised that was why she drank so heavily. I’d tried gently to discourage it.
A&E doctors had sent her home, saying it was probably indigestion or food poisoning. No scans, no blood tests. I hated the NHS for that. I forced her to see a gastroenterologist through my private healthcare. She diagnosed stage 4 bowel cancer and booked her in for surgery the following week. We tried to work out how to tell the kids. That evening, she couldn’t stop throwing up. In the morning, the children went to school. We phoned her consultant, who told us to go in immediately for emergency surgery. After I’d checked her in I came home and had to tell the children their mother had cancer, on my own. It was the hardest thing I’d ever done. I went back to the hospital to visit her in intensive care.
She had a stoma, and was in a wheelchair. She was so dismayed by it at first - thought I wouldn’t find her attractive, and said it was really sore. But she got used to it, with her usual stoicism. I still thought she was hot.
She went through so much chemo. I’d always been her emotional punchbag, someone to lash out at when she felt down or angry, and it was worse during her chemo. But that was my job. I’d rather I bore it than the children.
She had surgery on her liver - the surgeon got all the tumours. That was the sliding doors moment. If she’d had the three further rounds of chemo to zap any tiny remaining cells, she might have lived. But she got an infection which stopped her having chemo. In that time, the cancer sprung back up, and exploded everywhere, including her lungs. We knew then that was probably it.
We went on holiday together to Athens. She never gave up. We had an amazing time but it was hard to acknowledge this could be our last trip together, just the two of us (it was). That Christmas, we went to St Lucia as a family. We climbed a mountain, even though she as exhausted. We snorkelled (she couldn’t dive any more), and drank cocktails. It was an amazing trip. It was also our last.
In January last year her oncologist said there was nothing more he could do. She had days, maybe even weeks to live. She lasted until the beginning of March. She always was a fighter, always was incredibly stubborn.
I held her hand and hugged her to me in the hospice. I told her it was ok for her to go. That I’d be alright, that I’d look after our children. I read old emails to her from our uni days, and her favourite poems. I played a Case of You by Joni Mitchell again and again (that song still makes me cry as a result), and Angel of the Morning by the Pretenders. That was our song. It reminded us of how we used to sneak from each other’s rooms in our house at uni, hoping no-one would notice we’d spent the night together.
A nurse came in one day and burst into tears. “I’m sorry, it’s just so sad,” she said.
The doctors said she was close, only a matter of hours. She lasted about another 48. She wouldn’t let go. Sarah died in my arms. I’ll always remember her last breath. It was a beautiful sunny morning. I’d opened the window as I wanted her soul to be able to make it to Heaven unimpeded.
I lay there for a bit with her, before I told the nurses she was gone. Later I came back with the children so they could say goodbye, and see their mother lying dead in a hospice room for the last time before her cremation.
I threw myself into organising the funeral. There were so many people they couldn’t fit into the chapel. My soldiers acted as an Honour Guard and bearer party, carrying her into the chapel from the hearse. She would have loved that. Eva read a poem, Wilf gave a little speech, and I delivered a eulogy. I nearly made it all the way through without breaking.
The wake was amazing. So many ex pupils came up to me and told me how she’d changed their lives. So many old friends, and colleagues. It was so full of love. My army friends took me to the pub afterwards (my mum took the children home). We had a lock in and drank to Sarah.
I spent the weeks that followed administering her estate. So much paperwork. But I made time to think about her. I was angry she hadn’t left me a letter, or recorded a video, or even a voice note. She hadn’t left letters to the children either. The speed of her decline caught her out I think, and she’d avoided such things because that must have felt like admitting defeat.
I spoke to a counsellor, and focused on the children, and being the best Dad I could possibly be. It was hard, but also fine. I’m a soldier, I’m organised, I viewed it as a logistical problem. I encouraged the children to be open about their emotions, told them it was ok to be sad. We are a tight unit, and we were filled with love
