When John died, it was the speed of it all that stunned me at first. He’d been feeling a bit tired and generally under the weather and I’d told him firmly to go to the doctor, but I was convinced he was nurturing a diplomatic flu, as he was fed up at work.
He was referred for further investigation immediately, which should have made us suspicious, but it took the mention of an operation to make us realise that this was serious.
In the three weeks from his first visit to the doctor till the night he died, we didn’t face the possibility of his cancer being terminal. We kept reassuring each other that something could be done.
All our families and quite a few friends were in the house that night, as they had been regularly once we told everyone John was ill. His brother was helping him upstairs for a lie down and John called to me and it sounded so urgent and desperate that I dropped the baby into my mum’s arms and ran to him and he just died there, at the bottom of the stairs with his brother and me holding him.
People talk about living in a blur but that’s the only way I can describe the next few weeks. You don’t expect to die at 30 and it seemed totally unreal telling our three year old daughter that Daddy had gone to heaven. Our son was still a baby at 11 months and our family and friends, who were equally shocked, looked after everything for me to begin with.
John and I met at university when we were both 19 and despite being totally different — or maybe because we were so different — we were inseparable instantly. I absolutely adored him, with his relaxed attitude to life, especially since I’ve always been a bit of a control freak. We worked well together, with me getting him to most of his lectures and him persuading me that student life involved much more than just studying.
Our first three years together were so happy we got a lot of teasing from friends, as we were the only settled couple. John proposed the day we graduated and we decided to get married the following summer, which meant a lot of saving and organising. Suddenly, we were doing very grown-up things. Or rather, I was, and John was hovering in the background.
I realised then that I had always assumed that John would become much more focused and organised once we started working. I’m a psychologist, so the three years after university meant a lot of studying, doing my doctorate as well as working.
However, John, who was a lawyer, never felt he should help out a bit more or start concentrating on his own career. His work attendance record was dreadful, usually as a result of hangovers, and he got really annoyed when the first firm he worked in didn’t offer him a partnership — refusing to accept that he couldn’t possibly seem committed enough.
He moved to another firm and two years later the same thing happened again, but he couldn’t seem to grasp the connection between still living like a student and not being taken seriously.
I probably colluded in his delusion because it was easier for me to manage all the family finances and organise things than depending on him to do it. We were delighted when I became pregnant and he was a fantastic father to both our children and still irresistible to me most of the time — except when I was too tired to appreciate a spontaneous bottle of champagne or night out.
When he died, I thought it was the end of the world. I didn’t know you could miss someone desperately and yet manage to get on with all the ordinary things in life, but with small children you don’t have a choice.
The second shock, however, was realising how comfortable we now were financially. The mortgage was paid off and John’s pension scheme kicked in immediately. I had always had both of us well-insured and now had a lot of money in the bank. It was an odd feeling, because John believed in living beyond your means, while I had had a gnawing worry about cash since we got our first mortgage. Mixed in with my grief was relief that I no longer had to worry about money.
As the months passed I realised that, while I still missed John, I didn’t miss the unreliability which was part of everything he did. He was engaging and fun and totally charming, but sometimes you also need the chores done. I know that he loved me dearly, but I also know that he felt I’d become immersed in domesticity, which is difficult to avoid when juggling a job and very young children.
Over the years I’d become much less lively and put on weight, but the utter misery of the first few months without John resulted in me losing every extra kilo and more. I’m not exactly dressing to go out on the town but I certainly feel a lot more confident about my looks.
Six months after John’s death I was enrolling my daughter at nursery, when I got asked out by a divorced dad who I knew vaguely. It was lovely to be asked but I had no intention of going. That night I lay in bed and thought about what had happened to our family in the last six months.
I’m organising life and the family single-handed, the way I always did, but now I’m not panicking about lack of money or other disruptions. Friends are still involving us in their lives, both families are happy to babysit, and I’m back at work. So everything goes on the same for the children, although we do miss John.
It’s a terrible thing to admit, but now that I’m over the worst of the shock and the grief, I think I honestly prefer life this way.
All names have been changed. Picture posed by models.
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