FIRST PERSON

When Danaë Brook’s husband died suddenly without signing his will, her inheritance was left subject to the little-known laws of intestacy. Here, she describes the legal, emotional and financial turmoil that followed

When Danaë Brook’s husband died without signing his will, it left her elif in ruins

If you die without signing your will in this country, you leave chaos behind you. The lack of clarity intensifies bereavement and pitches family members into a cauldron of legal dictates. Bank accounts are frozen, cards unusable, cash inaccessible. If your partner dies intestate, it makes normal life almost impossible to retrieve.

It has been two and a half years since my husband died, aged 75, in the midst of winter. Scanning his x-rays, the doctors told us on New Year’s Eve that the mark on his lung was not a collapse of the lung as we had first thought, but advanced cancer. They didn’t tell us how long the tumour had been there or how long he had left to live, and we didn’t ask. As 2014 dawned, it rained incessantly and all I can remember is tears and rain as I drove up and down the motorway from London to Colchester, from hospital to home and back again.

Robin and I had known each other for more than 50 years, been together for 20, and married for 14. We’d first met in our late teens at Oxford, where for a couple of years we moved as friends in the same undergraduate circles. Satire and drama, rowing and racquets, and the odd game of poker and backgammon were part of Oxford student life back then. He took the Bullingdon Club members to Paris; I performed at the Edinburgh Festival with the group who created Private Eye. Later we moved to London and went our separate ways, both married to other people and barely seeing one another for the next 25 years. It was not until 1993 that we met again by chance at an art exhibition. We fell for each other immediately, dangerously, passionately.

It was totally unexpected. We were in our 50s, divorced from previous partners, single and not looking for anything more – but this was an electric, love-at-second-sight moment that was transformative for both of us. At the time I wrote (in YOU), ‘Finding the love of your life in the autumn of your life is a strange and humbling experience.’ It was also exhilarating, and a handful.

We had three grown-up sons each – six between us – and five grandchildren, but neither of us could imagine life without the other, so we lived together for the next 20 wonderful years. We moved to Robin’s mother’s house, in the heart of Constable Country, one of the most perfect valleys in England, and at the turn of the millennium, we married. Robin had his own business, Art Market Research, analysing changes in the global

He rewrote his will – but died the night before he was due to sign it Danaë today and, opposite, with Robin on their wedding day in 2000