Trudy and I met on the 28th of Feb 1997, I was 25 just about to leave the navy after 8 years and she was 35, by April I had moved in with her and on the 12th of June 1999 we were married. It is only now after she has passed away that I really appreciate what a fantastic life we had together, like any marriage we had our highs and our lows, but we worked through them because we loved each other. We had no children by choice, I had an awful upbringing that affected my view of family life and Trudy never wanted children, so we were on the same page. Our relationship started modestly, neither of us being well off but we both had a love of travel together that we managed to finance through hard work and saving. As we aged our love of travel stayed with us and finances improved over time so our travel was extensive and often, and our contentment only seemed to grow with age, we still fell out at times but it wasn’t the hard disagreements of new love, but the soft disagreements of content and happiness, understanding that we could disagree with each other without it being the end of the world. Life was great. Then it wasn’t, in 2020 Trudy was diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer, it was treatable, and we went through all of it together, the lows and the depths of fear and anger. The treatment was successful (partial mastectomy, chemotherapy and radiotherapy) but also left her with congestive heart failure due to the chemotherapy, it was manageable and towards the end of 2020 and the start of 2021 we started our life again with hope for the future. It was October 2023 that the cancer returned as secondary in the spine, liver, lungs and lymph nodes, this is now what’s known as treatable but uncurable, the news was horrible, even now sat here writing this I start to cry because we both knew that this was it. The worst prognosis was that if things didn’t go well then life expectancy was a year, and as with some things, it didn’t go well, the cancer continued to spread throughout all the treatment options and eventually on the 2nd of October 2024 Trudy passed away as her heart just couldn’t take any more. I was with her till the end and my last words to her were ‘I love you and always will, you have fought so hard and now it is time to rest, bye babes, love you’. At times I wish I hadn’t seen her die as it is an image I just can’t get out of my mind and haunts me in the bad times. I am writing this on the 11th of January 2025, and I hope as time goes on this image erases itself from my psyche. Grief is a horrible thing that to each person is subjective as we all as individuals feel and suffer differently, what may help one person wont always help another person. For myself Trudy and I were one person in two bodies, my loss is the better half of myself, the kinder half of myself and I feel it every day. The first week is awful, just numb with loss and uncertainty, but you have things you need to do such as the coroner and funeral arrangements and all the certificate of death arrangements. You do all this whilst carrying a world of sadness, hate, loss and fear on your shoulders, dragging you down. As time slowly carries on the loss doesn’t get easier as the old saying of ‘it will take time’ goes, the loss is the same but your coping with it gets better, you do not get any less sad or angry or less fearful, you just hide it better from yourself and the world around you. I will admit at my lowest I considered suicide, honestly anyone who has lost the love of their life and tells you they never once thought of it, I think they are lying. I don’t want to be here without Trudy, that’s it, its not a fear of being alone as I can be quite a solitary person. Its not having the person who was the other part of me missing, its that they will always be missing now. Still almost every night I hope I don’t wake up though thankfully the suicidal thoughts have gone. Life goes on even though you wish it didn’t, some things helped like the good advice you can find anywhere on the net, one of those was, you may think you have lots of reasons to die, you just need one reason to live. The example used was that if I wasn’t here, 27 years of memories of who Trudy was and the life she lived would be no more, and that helped me hang on. Some things you put off, thinking they are helping but it turns out they are hurting you, I left Trudy’s coats and shoes on the hangar in the entrance to our home. Whenever I came into the house, there they were to greet me with her smell and presence. I didn’t realise subconsciously this was me hoping that she was there when I came in, once I moved these things, I could start to face other things. Take your time though, don’t hurt yourself by doing things before you are ready, be kind to yourself if you can. I find that hard, I hate myself because I am here and she isn’t, I am sure if the roles were reversed, and I had died she would have coped better than I am. I am convinced I should have been a better husband and that somehow it is my fault, be kind to yourself if you can, easy to say, hard to do.
So here I am just over 14 weeks after her death, still suffering horribly, every first kills me, by that I mean it is a world of firsts, the first time for everything without my soulmate. Every time you have a big first it hurts, the first Christmas was my lowest and I am sure there will be many more such as the first anniversary of our meeting, the first set of birthdays, the first wedding anniversary and of course the first anniversary of her death. Sometimes I just want to run away from it all but I refuse to destroy the memory of what we had by being a coward, I refuse to let Trudy down by failing to be the person she loved, I refuse to let the memory of her love for me even on her death bed be tarnished by my failure to get through this. It’s a fight, I can’t guarantee I will win, but I will try the best I can. Let me end this by saying GRIEF is awful, it is debilitating in ways that you just can’t understand and F**K YOU CANCER.
