We would never have got together if our partners hadn’t died

Standing in our hotel room in Colchester, my girlfriend Emma and I should have been excited for our weekend break.

Unfortunately, she was in tears instead.   

Something I’d said on the journey earlier had clearly upset her and while I can’t remember the exact words I used, I do know that it concerned my previous partner and how she did things ‘differently’ when dealing with close family.  

Bringing up, let alone comparing, a former lover to your new partner is taboo for any relationship for this exact reason. But for us it was a bit more complex…  

Emma and I are both widowed.   

Emma’s husband had died of a brain tumour in 2006 and I lost my wife Vikki to breast cancer a year after that.   

So, though we never mean it to, sometimes the past has a habit of coming back to haunt the present.  

Love had been the furthest thing from both our minds when our paths crossed in 2008. In fact, it happened completely by chance.  

Our children were in the same class at school, and we initially met at her daughter’s birthday party. Our first conversation was very direct – we talked about other people’s reactions to grief and we seemed to click straight away.  

I really liked her – she seemed clever, funny and fearless – and I thought she was gorgeous, too. I could immediately envisage a deeper relationship – it really was in that instant – but I dismissed it because it seemed too easy.  

How could a lovely, amazing woman who understood me, be a widow, too?  

On reflection though, it was my own cynicism and confidence that was the problem. After having a tough time for so long, I had to allow myself to accept that something wonderful could happen to me again, that I truly deserved a new and happy life.       

When we finally did get together, other people were so clearly pleased at our ‘Hollywood ending’ that they’d take me aside at parties to express how delighted they were.  

Of course, we were happy too. While grief was obviously a large part of what brought us together in the first place, we were also wrapped up in the newness of the relationship.   

It was such a relief just to share with someone again, have fun, be normal – simple things like going to the cinema, enjoying coastal walks, playing board games with the kids – it was all such a change after years of hospital treatments, scans and test results; of feeling like your life was on a permanent cliff edge.

And yes, it helped that she and I both understood each other in a way our friends and family couldn’t – there was nothing wrong with that, on the contrary, it was great.  

We knew what it felt like getting through those painful early anniversaries – the birthdays and Christmases. We understood how it felt to just get up on an average day and for no apparent reason, feel the sudden crushing weight of loss again.  

However, a year or so in, an agitating, niggling voice began to rear its head.  

From there, the inevitable complications, doubts, worries, insecurities – which I suppose had always been there – became more prominent.   

Was our attraction just a smokescreen? Did we really share more than tragedy and pain and a pretty good feel for the relative merits of oak versus oak-and-copper funeral caskets? Or was death such a big part of our relationship it was all we really had in common?  

In both cases it wasn’t our choice to end our relationships with our previous partners, so how could we ever properly love a new partner when we’d never decided to stop loving the previous one?   

Then there was the fact that, though we avoided the untidiness and sense of bitterness that clouds some divorces, there was something else just as potent that we had to contend with: The deification of the deceased.  

You can’t compete with a dead person.   

They don’t make mistakes and it’s a natural tendency to edit the past – the untidy bits, the poor bits – to paint those gone in a rosy hue somewhere in the region of perfection, and that’s exactly what I did in that moment of thoughtlessness in that Colchester hotel room.  

Thankfully, I recognised what I’d done immediately and apologised, and she accepted and we moved past it. One of the things that we’ve both carried forward from our shared past is the inability to hold grudges. 

To this day, Emma and I rarely argue and, if we do, one of us stops it almost instantly – not because we’re saints but because after everything we’ve been through, we know this time together is so precious and we’d rather not waste it.  

That’s one of the reasons why in the end we haven’t let our double bereavement overwhelm us. That, and the fact that there is so much more to our relationship than our common experience of losing a partner.  

We make each other happy. We make each other laugh. We’re interested in each other, engaged by each other. We miss each other when we’re apart.    

So, while it’s true we wouldn’t have got together if our partners hadn’t died, we also certainly wouldn’t have survived this long if we hadn’t shared a lot more.   

In fact, our relationship, far from being weakened or undermined by our shared history, has in some ways, been strengthened by it.     

We have a better perspective when everyday things go wrong; we have a sort of measure against which we assess things and once you’ve looked on helplessly while your partner slips away, it turns out that bar ends up being pretty high.  

Life is very short, and we don’t want to let any more of it slip by. We want to live. We want to flourish. We want to have fun. And that, for everyone, whether widowed or not, is surely the ultimate goal. 

Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing jess.austin@metro.co.uk. 

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