How can I get over the death of my first true love?

DEAR BEL,

BACK in the early 2000s when I was about 16, I met a boy in a chat room — I’ll call him Tom.

Funny and handsome, he lived in Ireland. I’m in England. We began to talk all day every day. We would chat away with our webcams on, email, text and phone each other for hours. It was easier to pour our hearts out in ways we may not have done to our ‘real’ friends. This may not make sense, but I fell with all the full force of a ‘first love’.

Tom said he felt the same and from then he called me ‘the fiancée’, not just to me but to his family and friends who I would sometimes speak to during our calls/chats.

Our conversations now included hopes for our future life of getting married and naming our children. It was the typical teenage certainty that life would just land in our laps.

The inevitable eventually happened with two young people hundreds of miles apart — I was devastated when Tom told me he’d slept with someone who became his girlfriend for a time. There were tears on both sides but we did reconnect and often chatted online and on the phone over the following years.

The last time Tom surfaced we had a nice chat about where we were in life. He sent me a message again a few days later but I didn’t reply — I was busy in my last year of university and just starting a new relationship.

Fast forward just over a year and I had been thinking about Tom for a while as this was the longest we’d gone since we ‘met’ without some form of communication.

Investigating social media I discovered he had died that very weekend, at 25. Shortly after his last message to me Tom was taken ill and found to have cancer. This was over a decade ago. Now I’m in my mid30s. The weight of carrying this on my own and never being able to grieve openly or get closure is like a millstone around my neck.

I now have a lovely, kind fiancé, but how could I ever tell him about Tom and lay bare my grief? I don’t think that would be fair on him and I wouldn’t want to risk upsetting him or our relationship. I feel guilty for not replying to his last message and that he went through so much. Did he know how much he meant to me? I brood on all the ‘nearly’ moments when we talked about meeting but didn’t. Perhaps he thought I’d never find out, or maybe he didn’t think of me at all. Am I being ridiculous?

JESSICA

FIRST, let me hold out a sympathetic hand and assure you gently that you are not in the slightest bit ‘ridiculous.’

Your story touched me deeply and I understand why part of you remains lost in that dream.

Tom was your first love and those deep awakenings into adulthood must never be belittled. Who dares say they are not real? In a realistic future, you might have even moved in together, become bored, quarrelled, been unfaithful, wept, and parted. Or been happy.

But circumstances dictated that all your many ‘meetings’ remained on screen and on phone lines. And tragically, Tom was destined never to grow old. His sweet ghost remains perpetually ‘funny and handsome’ in your imagination. Isn’t that fantasy a mirror for all the unfulfilled youthful longings and lost loves so many of us cherish secretly in our hearts?

The question is — what now? Being in love with a ghost can be very destructive; it would be terrible if you were to allow the boy you adored to become a malignant spirit poisoning past, present and future.

You say I’m the only one you have talked to about this, which is a shame. Carrying these memories — the shock of finding out about his early death and then subsequent grief — by yourself is clearly very lonely. You are now engaged to a ‘lovely, kind’ man, and will make a future with him. An adult relationship requires honesty and trust. You seem almost ashamed of your touching first love story.

You write, ‘I don’t think that would be fair on him and I wouldn’t want to risk upsetting him or our relationship’ — but I profoundly disagree. Yes, we can all retain some privacy and needn’t share youthful misdemeanours, but I believe your fiancé has the right to know about something that’s afflicting the woman he loves. The relatively speedy death from cancer of anybody age 25 is terribly sad, and can even call into question our views on life, death and religion. So I think you should talk about it all.

In confiding in each other stories about what you were each like at 16, what choices you made, those early passions and first disillusionments, you and he will be helping to build and strengthen your future life together. And I think it would be healing to allow poor Tom to become a part of that process. You can achieve closure and peace by making a pilgrimage.

You tell me you know where your first love is buried. I suggest you and your fiancé plan a short holiday, when you will be able to put flowers on Tom’s grave.