I Promise We'll Be All Right

Tim Mitchell’s wife died of terminal cancer in December 2014, at the age of just 43. Here, Tim describes how he managed to cope with the aftermath

- Hayley Richardson

It took about 15 minutes for my wife to die. on the day she arrived at the hospice she’d been sitting up, chatting away and could just about stand. Three days later she started having breathing diffculties – I can’t remember what the technical term is but your lungs fill up with liquid and you effectively drown. Then she was gone.

Right in the immediate aftermath, for the first few days, you’re kind of reliving that. I didn’t cry. Tears probably aren’t a strong enough reaction. I threw up on a regular basis.

It was 21 December, so I focused on doing everything I could to salvage Christmas for our children Ollie, then nine, and Flori, three. You forget about yourself. You’re so busy trying to keep everything together, trying to be this superhuman who can fulfil the role of two people. You go into a state of, ‘You’ve got to do and not think’. If you stop and think about it, you’ll realise what has happened.

Grief counselling

I remember just being able to function, and that was it. You’re numb, you’re in complete shock.

That lasted for a long time – several months. Everybody is being sympathetic but you don’t want them to be. There are lots of comings and goings of relatives who you probably only half know and you don’t want there – but you need them.

One of the really horrible things is that you have to register the death within three days. So you go to the council registry – Wiltshire in my case – and you’re sitting there filling out your name, your occupation and your marital status, and you have to say widowed.

Even now saying it, I well up. After 10 years of marriage it’s rather diffcult – suddenly, this is who I am.