HUSBAND FINDS HAPPINESS AGAIN
Robbie or making things awkward for him with his father. But then, where were the boys in Lynda’s final hours? With him. They should have been with their dying mother around the bed – the three of us.” Michael, who faced criticism over his apparently lavish spending after Lynda’s death, reveals that far from squandering her money, she left debts totalling £50,000. He adds defiantly: “I couldn’t have spent her nonexistent money, as probate hadn’t been granted.” The accusations from Lynda’s sons did not stop there. Michael was said to have paraded his grief while taking a lover to what had been the marital bed. He says: “Lynda and I had a very active sex life. That was well documented in her autobiography. But when she was diagnosed, it stopped. “It would have felt wrong to make love to a woman who was terminally ill. I started grieving for Lynda from the moment the oncologist said she had Stage 4 cancer. She’s in my thoughts every day, but life has moved on.
“I’d met a woman through a possible business venture and we got to know each other. One evening, I wanted to bring her back to the London flat where I lived with Robbie and my son, Bradley.
“I phoned Robbie and said I planned to invite her over and was that all right with him? He said, ‘It’s your home. You do whatever you want’.
SPIRIT
“Now I’m accused of disrespect by allowing another woman into our bed, surrounded by photos of Lynda. I did share that bed with another woman.
“But what they don’t know is, we never had sex. When it came to it, I couldn’t. It didn’t seem right.”
While publicising his book about life with Lynda, Michael told Spirit and Destiny magazine he had made love to her “ghost spirit”. Lynda’s sons, they said, saw that as the last straw. Does he regret that revelation? “Yes and no,” he says. “I had no wish to disrespect her memory. I’ve always felt her presence. I talk to her in my head.
“What Michael and Robbie don’t understand is that Lynda and I both had very strong beliefs about life after death. I believe the spirit lives on. I’ll never forget her last hours as she slipped into deep sleep.
“I telephoned her dear friend, actor Nickolas Grace, one of two men who gave her away on our wedding day. Nick and I sat either side of her bed holding her hands and talking to her.
“She couldn’t answer but I believe she heard us. As she breathed her last she squeezed my hand, opened her eyes one final time and then was gone.
“It was like somebody saying, ‘Hi, Lynda, we’ve come to get you’ – a switch had suddenly been flicked.
“Earlier, I’d phoned Michael and Robbie. When they arrived, I’d let them go in to her on their own. They weren’t in there long. They came out and left. Five hours later, they returned – their mother had already died.”
Michael was also criticised by Lynda’s sons for taking off on a roundthe-world jaunt after her death.
“But it was 10 months later and was something Lynda and I had been planning,” he says. “It was something of an escape after she’d gone.
“I was alone with my memories in the loneliest two months of my life. I needed to make decisions about what to do with the rest of my days.”
One of those decisions was to move back to Somerset and reconnect with his childhood roots.
“Lynda always made it clear that one day she wanted me to meet another woman. I want to love again, although it’s hard to imagine I could meet someone who meant as much.”
Meanwhile Michael is left with his memories of a wife loved and lost, and a toxic relationship with her two sons.
I knew Lynda for almost 30 years, first as a journalist then as a friend – back to when Michael and Robbie were small boys. To me, the real sadness is that the three men she loved more than anyone in the world should fall out so spectacularly.
“Lynda must be spinning in her grave,” agrees Michael. “She would have hated how my relationship with her sons has come to this.
“But the damage is done. There’s nothing I’d like better now than to let the poor woman rest in peace.”
She’s full of sunshine and happiness, we have lots of laughs. It’s been such a tonic MICHAEL PATTEMORE ON FINDING LOVE WITH PAM