Community & Connection

Hello everyone,

This is my first message here, and it feels strange - but in a good way - to talk to people who will have an understanding of what I am going through. In my 'real' life, I have two colleagues who lost their partners around the same time as I did. Even though we only cross paths once in a while, the connection we have with each other when we do is not like I have with anyone else and feels valuable - they understand, whilst no one else really does, not even close family. So I am sure it might feel the same way here. From looking at some of the beautiful and thoughtful messages here, I am sure it will.

My wife Philippa (Phil) died on Christmas Day, 2024, at 49. This Christmas has been absolutely awful. I was dreading it, but what can you do to prepare? You can't avoid it, it is going to happen. I can't begin to explain it or analyse it - but I'm sure everyone here knows the feeling, and I don't need to. But I feel a lot weaker now than I was in, say, September. Living through it all again has knocked me back.

Phil suffered a lot in her life, and none of it was fair, but the last year and a half were an excruciating, frightening hell for her. Even so, she was not expected to die when she did - in the slowness of her illness, it all happened very suddenly. She had terminal cancer, which had left her unable to walk, stand or get out of bed for about 18 months, but she was OK in herself until a few days before Christmas, when she contracted pneumonia. Even then, we didn't think she wouldn't recover from it. And then suddenly she just... didn't. She was in hospital for the pneumonia, and I woke up on Christmas morning just knowing that something had happened overnight. I dashed to the hospital to find that she had had what looks like a heart attack. Her family joined me, and we were just in time, all of us, to sing her a Christmas carol before she slipped away. The trauma of everything - of her illness, how it ripped everything away from her, of the pain, the lack of dignity, and then the end... She couldn't say a word in the last days, but I know how terrified she must have been. I can't get the images of any of it out of my head, ever, but this Christmas was sickeningly horrible.

Increasingly I feel like the only person/people who can understand, who can have the patience and the right sort of sympathy, is another widowed partner. Someone you don't have to struggle to find the words for - because they already know. I find that talking to other people when they ask how I am - well, it often makes it worse, not because I don't want to talk about Phil, but because when I try to find a way to explain how it feels, it just brings everything back again. Whereas with those two colleagues - well, they already know. We can skip that bit. And that really helps. Hoping for the same here.

Thanks for reading this,

Luke