My ex didn’t want me to see him die

MY HUSBAND and I split up nearly 30 years ago and neither of us remarried or even found another partner. We lived close by each other and (unknown to everyone) saw each other every week or so.

We were intimate but that wasn’t the whole point of the visits. We cooked each other meals and enjoyed each others’ company.

For complicated reasons, he hardly saw our children, although he paid for them and they grew up loving their dad.

About three years, ago he began to grow distant and put off our meetings. We hadn’t quarrelled, so I was bewildered.

Eventually, he said he didn’t want to see me again. Two months later, I found out he was in a hospice, dying of cancer.

He wouldn’t let me visit, but I discovered my daughter had been caring for him at his home when he became ill, even though she hadn’t really known him. She had found out about his illness from one of his friends. He made her promise not to tell me.

He died shortly afterwards, with our daughter holding his hand. She said I’d never have recognised him at the end. He wanted to protect me, but I can’t forgive him for allowing our daughter to be with him. She suffers from slight mental health problems and gets depressed. She’s said repeatedly that the memory of his terror at the moment he died gives her nightmares. Of course I can’t blame him though.

I grieved when he died, although people said: ‘Oh, you’d been apart a long time anyway.’ Things were starting to get slightly easier, but a few months ago I began thinking about him a lot. It’s got worse and I cry constantly. I’m bedbound and live alone, so I’ve plenty time on my hands.

He’s become an obsession and I have to get some sort of life back again.

ISLA

THIrTY years ago something rather mysterious happened: you ceased to be married, yet remained closer than many married couples. Even more mysterious, your husband hardly knew his children yet ‘they grew up loving their dad’. Was their estrangement something to do with your divorce? Who instigated the split? Why did you need to keep your ongoing relationship with him a secret and why are you still afraid they will find out, as you mention in your uncut letter?

It’s very strange. Yet your daughter was ready to embrace secrecy, too, and not whisper to you that her father was ill. Oh, how much time is lost forever in families where people don’t talk to each other! It’s tragic.

Your current home situation is clearly very hard; no wonder you are in a state of permanent upset. But I wonder whether it’s entirely due to grief for your ex?

May I gently suggest that confusion shows in two contradictory statements: ‘I can’t forgive him,’ and ‘I can’t blame him.’ You do blame him and feel jealous and shut out because your daughter was with him at the end. Did he do this to protect you? Did he think you couldn’t cope? What’s more, you lived ‘close by’ yet never went round to see him. Are you now consumed with guilt (as well as grief) because of that unbridgeable gulf?

I suspect it’s getting ‘worse’ because you haven’t begun to make sense of what happened. Many people grieve at the death of an ex-partner, because you are mourning the life you didn’t have

DEAR BEL,

together, the potential wasted, the love you couldn’t sustain.

Such feelings must be made worse for you by the strange, secret life you led with him afterwards and the knowledge that, in the end, he didn’t want you to be with him, for whatever reason.

I do not say these things to make you sadder (and I’m sorry if they do) but to encourage you to look back with honesty and acceptance and to look forward with your confusion laid to rest.

Now I think you should be honest with your children, perhaps for the first time, and not continue with this strange, inexplicable charade that you didn’t see their father. How can you unburden yourself to them if you don’t tell them your real feelings? You will surely need your family in the coming months and years.

I think your heart will be easier if you give those you love the gift of truth, at last. If you let them know that their father and you had a complicated relationship, yet loved each other.

Why not try writing it all down because, after all, you close your original email to me saying it helped to write this down?

I think it’s time to celebrate with your children everything that was good about the man you all loved.