My toyboy ex-lover is dead and I’m racked with grief

You criticise yourself in that last sentence, so it is not for me (who well knows what it is to be horribly ‘irresponsible and careless’ and then regret it) to pass further judgment.

When there seems to be little selfknowledge within a letter, I might suggest a home truth or two (see below), but you know exactly what you did and why. What matters now is the stability and happiness you feel with your husband, and the future you have as a family.

My sense is that your days of careless flings abroad are over. I hope so. But you’ve been knocked sideways by the sad news about your young, former lover and don’t know how to ‘process’ the information. That’s an odd word to choose: the premature death of anybody is cause for ‘unprocessed’ sadness, so let me ask this: is this confusion because you don’t actually know how you feel?

Are you genuinely sad to hear of the death of a man with whom you felt ‘no emotional connection’, or does the news awaken unspoken fears within you; dark thoughts about your own mortality?

You clearly feel guilty — but is that because you hurt Will, or because of your multiple betrayals of your husband? I can see why so many different emotions will be swirling

around within you — all the more exhausting because it’s impossible for you to tell anyone how you feel.

What to do? I think you have to find a way of honouring what you and Will shared, even if your affair was more emotional for him than you. Privately, to remember the sex and the fun you shared will do no harm to anybody and is perhaps more useful at this stage than shame. I see no point in beating yourself up about what you have or have not done in the past.

Surely all experience is given to us to learn from, and the Christian religion teaches that sinners can be forgiven if they repent. Which you do. So now is the time to give thanks for that forgiveness, and for the fact that any joy shared never quite loses the hold it had on our lives.

My suggestion would be that you carry out a small ritual to help you come to terms with what was and what is. You can’t talk to anybody — so I think you should talk to Will.

Honestly, such deliberate actions, which are thoughts made concrete, can be very healing.

I suggest you write an old-fashioned letter to him (you cannot beat the action of pen on paper for these things) setting out how you met, what you shared and thanking him for the good times and the wonderful way he made you feel.

Tell him how sorry you are that you didn’t quite understand what the relationship meant to him — and thank him, too, for caring about you even when you had said goodbye. Express your anguish that his worthwhile life and career have been cut so brutally short, and promise you will never forget him.

Then seal the letter in an enve-lope, take it somewhere private and beautiful, and put a match to it, watching the smoke and sending a blessing with it in a long exhalation of breath.

That’s what I would do. Then I would turn back to the good fortune of my present life and greet it afresh with wide open arms.