This Breast Cancer Awareness Month, WAY Widowed and Young member Adam shares his experience of losing his wife, Sarah, to breast cancer in 2022, and the reality of learning to cope with grief while raising their daughter, Lily. 

I lost my wife, Sarah, in 2022 to breast cancer caused by a BRCA2 genetic mutation. Everything I knew in life fell apart at the very moment I lost Sarah. Overnight, I became a widower, a single parent to our six-year-old daughter Lily, and someone trying to understand who I was without the person I had expected to share my life with.

Soon afterwards, my mother-in-law, who was Lily’s closest family member after her mum, became seriously ill and passed away within a short time. There was some reliance on me to be heavily involved in this, which  only made grieving harder for us. We barely had time to process one loss before facing another.

Before Sarah died, I had been very career-focused. But my employer was far from supportive and, with that, my career was over at that very moment too. My sole focus and only care in the world became my family and myself. The following months were a full reset and a fast learning curve in how to look after my young daughter on my own.

The hardest mental part has been watching Lily grow up. It happens so quickly, and there are all those proud parent moments that you have no one to share with. Everyday parenting also changed in ways I had never expected. I had to take on the household chores and cooking day in, day out, every day without fail. If I don’t do them, they simply don’t get done.

More recently, it has been clothes shopping – navigating a young girl growing up who wants certain fashions or designs that I simply do not know anything about. We are also coming to the point of the early teen female changes to navigate. It is just a simple case of having to learn on the fly. Friends and family help, but it still comes down to me behind the closed doors at the end of the day.

There have been practical moments too. One of the hardest, in an unexpectedly everyday way, is going to the toilet when we are out. A father and young girl creates a challenge about which toilet to use. We either aim for an accessible toilet if we can, or opt for the women’s. Thankfully most women seem understanding, although I have certainly had some funny looks at times.

Our family journey also included my stepson, Harry. He was a young adult at university and just starting out on his adult life when Sarah died. He stayed at home for the first year and was a big help, but he also very much had and needed his own independence. He is now living away from home and doing well for himself in the early stages of a great career. A year after Sarah died, he graduated from university – something that should have been an unreserved celebration, but was filled with the sadness of Sarah not being there to see it.

Spinning plates

In the first months after Sarah died, I tried to keep everyone at bay while juggling Lily, housework, schoolwork, work problems, “sadmin” and everything else. I had counselling through the charity Sue Ryder, via the hospice Sarah was at, and I was lucky to find a counsellor I could confide in comfortably. In one session, she described all the things I was trying to manage as a circus act, spinning plates. At some point, if you don’t control them, one will fall – and if one falls, they all fall. It hit me hard. I realised I had to reduce some of those spinning plates and carefully control how many I had going at any one time. As I got stronger, I could slowly introduce more plates to balance; at tricky times, I still picture them in my mind and ask whether I can reduce some again.

Finding the peer support network WAY Widowed and Young has been an important part of rebuilding. Turning up to my first WAY event and not knowing what to expect, I was so relieved to leave a few hours later surrounded by a small group of people at different stages of grief, all talking openly about the same feelings I was going through and the thoughts about the future I had been thinking. It felt like a breath of fresh air to talk so easily to someone without getting generic reassurance or meaningless advice from people who simply did not know how I was feeling.

WAY has helped Lily too. When I took her to her first event, it was amazing to see this normally shy child in new situations quickly bond and gel with other children. Nothing was said, but there was a definite sense that ‘they know’. Many different events later, it is nearly always the same reaction with the children.

Finding a new normal

Small things have helped Lily and me rebuild a sense of normal life. We have special one-to-one bonding time with no distractions, doing whatever we need in that moment – a hug, a chat, a cry, reading together, laughing or playing games. That time was the start of building our own special bond and trust in each other. We make sure we can speak openly and honestly about anything. It gave the foundations of and confidence for Lily truly trusting that what I say is what will happen. Having our own space is equally important to growing that bond as being closely together; finding the balance is the hard part.

Six months after Sarah died, I spotted a small part-time role and thought, ‘Well, that will give me something to do for myself.’ It was the best thing for me. I loved it and stayed for three years. It gave me focus – something to think about outside home life – while still leaving more than enough time to manage what I had to do at home without additional stress. It was at that point I started to rebuild myself. A back injury later forced another change, but I have since found a home-based role that allows me to balance work with what matters most: being there for Lily and giving her stability, love and support.

Sarah’s experience has truly made me aware that breast cancer can happen to anyone. I was fortunate enough before only to ‘know of others’ who had faced scares around breast cancer. Understanding that it can happen to anyone, and that early prevention – however that may be – is so very important, is something I now carry with me.

Sarah’s diagnosis also left us with the knowledge that BRCA2 is hereditary. Lily, who is now 10, cannot be tested until adulthood, and she is too young to understand what it could mean. For now, I try to put it to the back of my mind where I can. At the minute it needs to remain a ‘me’ problem until she is old enough to understand and consider options for herself. But when Lily has something a bit different wrong with her and we need a trip to the doctor, it can bring me straight back to the early days of Sarah’s diagnosis – those days of in-denial thinking nothing serious would happen, until it did.

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