CHRISTMAS AFTER THE LOSS OF A LOVED ONE: REAL-LIFE HEART-RENDING STORIES

‘I spend my Christmas Day with relatives since my husband’s sudden death’

Mum-of-three Kate Devlin was on holiday in Co Cork with her husband Paul and three young daughters when he died suddenly in 2015. Here the psychologist, who lives in Belfast but is originally from Salisbury in England, explains how she and her family deal with their grief at what was once the happiest time of the year.

Paul and I met when we were studying at Queen’s University. I did psychology, he was studying English and we were both part of the Drama Society. He really was everything to me: my best friend, my husband. We were together a long time, more than 20 years, by the time he died.

He was only 43. He had been healthy, or we thought that anyway. We were on holiday in the countryside down in Co Cork when it happened. The girls were small. Edie was five, Poppy was three and our youngest, Maille, was just five months old.

I had just finished feeding her in our bed when I heard Paul gasping and realised that something was wrong.

I did CPR. When the ambulance arrived, they tried to save him, but they couldn’t.

The grief at the start was overwhelming. Everything just went on auto-pilot. I’d never experienced any grief on that level and people came to help us with the most basic and practical things.

For a while at the start I thought I’d take the girls and move back to England, either back to Salisbury or to Birmingham, where Paul’s brother lived.

But someone advised me then not to make any major changes in that first year, so we held on.

We lived in Derry at the time, but eventually I took the girls back to Belfast, where Paul and I had lived for a long time. That was a big change.

We’re a few years down the line now, but Christmas is still hard. I always feel a bit more lonely because it’s all down to me.

I think as time went on, people returned to their own lives. You can’t expect them to be right on hand for you.

A lot of those big family things I do now on my own with the girls.

Going to see Santa, or going to the school fair, I know they have fun, but it still stings that we’re not the whole family in the way we were.

For Christmas Day itself, the way I looked at it from the very first year was that we had to completely change the traditions. We couldn’t just do the same thing we’d done.

I couldn’t replicate it for the girls the way they’d had it in the years before.

Paul was by far the better cook and he always did Christmas dinner. He dressed as Santa for the girls.

I was so desperately sad putting up the decorations and the tree without him that we had to go away. That’s what we’ve done every year since.

We go to Paul’s brother in Birmingham, where the girls have their cousins. The fun and magic is there. We go to Salisbury to see my family too. It’s a distraction. It’s a way of making them feel the fun and excitement of Christmas and masking the gap a bit that we have without Paul.

The main thing we’ve done in coping with what happened has been to talk all the time. I never stop them talking about Paul and I try not to shut them down if they ask me anything about him or what happened.

I think that part of it was not to mystify it, not to say that he was asleep or anything like that.

At the first Christmas, Edie hatched a plan that she would ask Santa to bring her daddy back for her. I’ve heard that that’s quite a common thing for children to do, but it was heart-wrenching and I had to tell her Santa couldn’t do it. It does get better, I suppose. As the children get older and enter different phases of their, lives it can take you by surprise. You get unexpected moments that really catch you and you have to try not to be caught out by a wave of sadness.

Having the girls has helped me enormously in getting through it. The last couple of Christmases, I’ve managed to enjoy putting the decorations up in the house and even enjoy a couple of Christmas tunes on the radio.

We’ve had great support from an organisation called Widowed and Young, which allowed us to go along on a couple of group holidays with families who had gone through the same thing. That sort of peer support can make a massive difference.

We also got some support from the Cruse Bereavement charity last year too.

It all really works towards helping you come to terms with what’s happened.”