Feels like you lose loved one every day
BARBARA Windsor’s death made me sad not just because the passing of someone famous feels like losing a friend, but because I know what her husband Scott has gone through.
Loving someone who is slowly being lost to Alzheimer’s feels like you are grieving every day.
Of course I still cry and long for my Colin. But I laugh too.
I think of the only time he shouted at me, when we’d spent hours trying to drive out of London and ended up three miles from where we first left off.
I chuntered at him the whole way home, saying: “The Knowledge?
Your head’s full of porridge”. Hours later, with me still nagging, he stopped the car at a lay-by near Watford Gap and said, “Val, if you don’t zip it, I’ll put you out of the car and leave you here”.
I knew he meant it so we didn’t speak until we’d reached Leicester and he turned to smile at me.
Bless him for putting up with me, because I’m a mouthy bugger.
I think of the romantic things he did, like leave me a vase of a dozen
red roses on the coffee table after I’d been away for a couple of days with a card that lovingly said, “Val, this home is just bricks and mortar without you in it”.
And I think of the times he said, “She’s not with me” when I re-enacted the old Impulse body spray advert by spraying myself with it and running to greet him at the airport.
Poor Colin – if he’d lifted me up and spun me around he’d have given himself a hernia.
Scott said Barbara was the love of his life, and Colin was mine. In time, when the ache of grief eases, I hope Scott will feel like me – happy and lucky to have had that love.