The long GOODBYE

Devoted wife and mum Helen Todd still shares a bed with her husband, but she’s lost everything they once had

- JADE BEECROFT, KARA O’NEILL.

Every morning, I wake up, roll over in bed and look at the man sleeping next to me. He’s my husband, David – the love of my life – but I barely recognise him.

We live together, eat together, watch TV together in the evenings, but if I’m brutally honest, he’s no longer the man I fell in love with. I stay because I promised I’d stand beside him in sickness and in health, and nothing could make me break those vows, but I feel angry that I only had just over a decade of happiness before our life and marriage were completely torn apart.

David and I had been hooked on each other since we met at the Bamboo Beach Club in Belfast in 2003. I was actually being set up with one of his mates, but preferred David. We very quickly became an incredible partnership. To our friends and family, we were Helen-and-David – we came as a pair. Moving in together felt like having my best friend sleeping over every night of the week.

Getting married in 2006 was the last piece of our jigsaw puzzle – until, a year later, we welcomed our son Josh. David was every inch the doting father, getting up for night feeds and changing nappies.

As Josh grew, he became such a daddy’s boy, and the pair of them would spend hours building Lego models together or battling it out on the PlayStation.

Warning signs

David had also been setting up our own business – a tile and bathroom showroom – so we worked hard during the week, then piled into our car at weekends for ‘family adventure days’, taking long walks, exploring forests or gambolling together on the beach.

When David first started complaining of a dull headache at the beginning of 2017, we just put it down to tiredness. He’d pop a couple of paracetamol tablets and the pain would go away, only to return again a few days later.