‘Enjoying Christmas with our boys is how I’ll honour Zoë’s memory’

Just a few days before her sudden death in late May, Zoë and her husband Andrew had a conversation that he returns to time and again.

They were driving to see a friend when the 38-year-old mum of their two young boys told him “she had everything she ever wanted in life”.

Six months after losing his “kind, caring, clever and beautiful” partner to sudden adult death syndrome, he says remembering that “heart-to-heart in the car… makes me feel so much better”.

Andrew, a 42-year-old mechanical engineer who works in the nuclear power industry, says the pair had been busy “doing life” until then.

Surrounded by toys, photographs and cats in the family home in Timperley, Greater Manchester, he says you can never tell your loved ones too often how much they mean to you.

“I think you take so much for granted in that they are there – that you get to just touch them, cuddle them. But do you ever tell them, ‘Oh yeah, you look really good today’ or ‘I’m so happy that you’re here’?

“You don’t, do you? I wish I’d done more, I wish I’d shown more how I felt. Zoë knew but…”

Facing his first Christmas without his wife, Andrew thinks this is indicative of our wider inability to talk about death, to even contemplate facing our worst nightmare.

Many people just do not know what to say, how to behave or how to best support a family member, friend or colleague who has lost their partner.

Andrew admits he used to be “terrible at this – I was always the person that hid away and didn’t approach it”.

There had been nothing to suggest Zoë, a partner in a Manchester law firm, was unwell before the unexplained cardiac arrest that took her life.

Having experienced such a traumatic loss, Andrew has thought about what people can do.

“Just acknowledging the pain, the grief and there’s nothing to say… being there for them is enough,” he says.

“Don’t ask what you can do – just do what you can do. Because I don’t know what I want, I don’t know what I need. I just need people to do something that they’re willing to do.

“Buy me some food or deliver some food. It doesn’t matter if I eat it or not – you’ve at least given me the choice, but you’ve not asked me to choose.

“Because if you would ask me ‘Shall I bring some food round?’ I’m probably gonna say ‘no’ because I don’t care. I will survive without it. But if you just do it, it’s there isn’t it?”

If the bereaved person does not immediately respond, he says you should not be surprised.

“In the early days I was getting text messages all the time from people. And if you were the last one I read before I went to sleep at night, that person got everything – they just got a horrible griefy message summarising my day.”

He says Benjamin Brooks-Dutton’s best-selling book – It’s Not Raining Daddy, It’s Happy – offers an invaluable insight into the new reality of living without your partner while supporting and looking after young children.

The pain and sense of overwhelming responsibility is so clear when Andrew talks about their beloved boys, four-year-old Joey and Tommy, who was a month away from turning two when his mum died.

“I’m not their dad anymore – I’m their parent,” Andrew explains. “My role has changed.”

Sounding wistful for a moment, he continues: “I really liked being Dad. But I can’t be the dad that I was – I have to be this. I have to do some of what she did.”

Widows and widowers talk about the pain of the “firsts” without their late partner – anniversaries, birthdays, major life events.

Andrew thought he would be celebrating Zoë’s 39th birthday on 23 December, quickly followed by the glorious chaos of Christmas with family, friends and their boys’ wide-eyed excited innocence.

The couple met by chance in September 2014 after independently booking a cycling holiday in Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam.

Andrew remembers the first time they met, thinking: “Wow – she is amazing!”

He adds: “I guess the beauty of a cycling holiday is that you have to look ahead – you can’t look at the person – you just talk and we talked and we hit it off.”

The young couple knew it was meant to be, and Andrew soon moved from Abu Dhabi to be with Zoë in Manchester, a city where he did not know anybody else.

“It’s what you dream of,” he says. “You know you’ve got this person who understands you, believes in you, accepts you, loves you, lets you be yourself and you learn that as your relationship grows.”

They moved in together before getting married in May 2017, enjoying what Andrew describes as “the perfect life – on Fridays we went to restorative yoga after work and then have a restorative pint on the way home”.

After struggling to conceive naturally and a failed course of IVF, their dream of having children finally came true when Zoë became pregnant with Joey, who was born in April 2021. Little brother Tommy followed in June 2023.

Andrew says he will spend much of the festive period potty-training his younger son.

Many widows and widowers raise an eyebrow when they hear well-meaning people urging them to “be strong” and saying things like “I don’t know how you do it.”

Andrew says: “You do have a choice but you don’t have a choice. It’s like I have to be. I feel this level of expectation from her – that’s who she was, that’s what she was.

“So for her to be proud of me – and that’s all I can do for her now, to honour her memory – is to be there for the boys, to be the best possible parent for the boys.

“Make sure they’re – I don’t like this – as impacted as little as possible by her loss. And they can be the people they were going to be.

“I really struggle with that because if I do a really good job as a parent her loss will be minimised. But if I do a really bad job as a parent that’s the loss of her.”

Andrew, who returned to work two months after he was widowed, says he only now fully appreciates his “male privilege” and everything that “amazing mother” Zoë did to support him and their boys.

He says time is now his most precious commodity, adding: “You just don’t have that backstop, do you? That extra support.”

Using a sporting analogy, the keen runner – who completes Parkruns every week by pushing his sons in their buggy – says: “When a player gets sent off in a football match, you still try and win the match with 10 men don’t you? And you just have to work a little bit harder.

“I feel that’s the point, that I still want the boys to enjoy life. And for the boys to enjoy life, I have got to enjoy life at some point.”

Andrew talks about Zoë being his “safety blanket that made me feel whole – she’s gone and I don’t feel whole. That’s love, I think, and that’s why it hurts so much.”

He says seeing happy couples walk hand-in-hand while Christmas shopping, just like he and his wife used to, is incredibly hard.

“It’s just accentuated at this time of year,” he says. “I’m trying to wrap presents – I hate wrapping presents.”

Talking about how that job always fell to Zoë, while he occupied the boys, he says: “I haven’t got ‘me’ to distract the kids.”

When you are rushing around, trying to do everything for your children and hold down a demanding job, how are there enough hours in the day?

Andrew says: “The bit that I struggle with is time. You don’t have space or time to grieve and feel or reflect. I think I had two months off work. After that, I was always busy.

“And I think I was – and I still am – scared of time on my own. I’m really scared because time on my own is actually time with Zoë.

“Because she’s there with me but you almost don’t want that because she’s not with you. You have to have it in your head.”

He struggles when asked what he thinks Zoë would want for him this Christmas and in the years to come.

Eventually, he replies: “It’s a horrible way to put it but she’s not here to live anymore.

“It’s silly for me not to live ‘cos she can’t. She would want me to live. I can’t put it any other way.”

• If you have been affected by the issues in this story, information and support is available via the BBC Action Line