Claire: So I suppose we should start by introducing ourselves. Would you like to start? Or would you like me to start? Okay, so I'm Claire. This is Mr Caps, if you can see Mr Caps. So I am here as a widow. I lost my husband nearly a year ago. He died here peacefully. And he was diagnosed all of a sudden completely out of the blue with advanced pancreatic cancer.

Rachel: So I’m Rachel. I’m also a widow. My partner Viv died about six months before Brad, so a little over a year ago. Nearly a year and a half ago. Also died at the hospice. And both of us were very well supported during that time.

Claire: Sitting there, it felt so surreal having this conversation about where do you want to die, Bradley? And you know, where's your second choice? And I'm just thinking things like, oh, we know we want him to die in the hospice, but we better think somewhere else. It was like somebody split our mind in half and there was one half saying, never give up, and the other half saying, we've really got to accept this that this is it, which we always knew was coming. And I remember saying to him on Brightlingsea Ward in the hospital, do you think you're dying? And he said, yes. And I said, what, what's different now? And he said, because I think I can accept it now.

Rachel: She knew she wanted to die at the hospice, but she was also, at that point, not ready to die. This was probably a month before she actually died. But even then we weren’t explicitly saying, you're going in to die or you're going in and you're not coming home again. But that last time in the hospice was, everything about it was different. She was still very engaged with people, but she was just in bed, not really moving, not really, you know, she sort of lost a bit of fight I think. And she would wake up and ask me a question or something and I don’t know how many times I had to say to her, I think you know, you might die soon.
You know, we had conversations about a funeral. She had a much stronger faith that I really knew. In fact, she left  these instructions that she hadn't discussed with me but she'd written them down. It was a very Christian funeral that she wanted.

Claire: We'd had a dry run two years earlier. I can remember at the end of that week getting in contact with a humanist celebrant. We wanted it at the village hall, we knew he wanted to be cremated and his ashes at the woodland burial grounds. That was kind of all in my head.

Rachel: In Viv’s notes, she left some sort of instructions for the funeral. But she'd written something in this book about, like, the music she wanted. But she basically said, I want you to have a right good party. And then like, it’s a bit of a bummer that I'm not going to be there. I think that's the thing, is that you miss the person that would have sort of organised it.

Claire: This is the thing because we had Bradley’s funeral, as you know, at Bradfield Village Hall. And there was a disco lights in the centre and I remember thinking oh my God if only we could get that working because he would have been guffawing wildly at the thought that there was a disco ball at his funeral.
Nothing prepares you for the point at which it actually happens. And to this day, I still can't believe he’s died.

Rachel: Simultaneously, utterly unbelievable and completely unquestionably the only thing that can happen. You know, it's like it's real and it's unreal at the same time.

Claire: In a way I recognise that people like you and I represent quite a frightening prospect. What do you say to someone who's been widowed in their 50s?

Rachel: Well, I was I was frightened of what my life was going to feel like. And, you know, whether I'd be able to cope after she died. It was a really scary prospect for a very long time.

Claire: I couldn't actually even begin to imagine what widowhood looked like. I couldn't get beyond the physicality of his death and how I was going to react to that.

Rachel: There's a point when you first, when you’re first kind of hit, when it just feels impossible and overwhelming and you know, just unbearable really. As time goes on, we're quite amazing creatures and we adjust, you know, you learn to live with the reality that your life does continue.

Claire: Like soldiers anticipate going into battle and then they go into battle and it happens. And it’s like death and widowhood are the same thing. However much I’m not ready for this, it’s going to happen. Death just happens, it’s normal, it just happens. And it’s an ordinary part of life and being widowed, being widowed is, it’s awful. And certainly I think the first few months I think I was probably in some sort of a daze. November, December, January were dreadful. And I was just sinking and sinking and sinking.

Rachel: That’s the thing isn’t it, about the support that you have to ask for or that finds you is that is can just validate those feelings. I suddenly found I couldn’t bare to part, for example, anything that she’d written on, so I had all these like shopping lists, I just had this realisation that there’s never, she’s never going to write another note, there’s now a finite number of things with her handwriting on in the world and I can’t be responsible for reducing that finite number. I mean, they’re valueless in and of themselves but I just couldn’t. That’s absolutely completely a thing, I think. The point at which you are ready to start letting go of things that are part of them in whatever way, whether it’s clothes or whatever. But yeah, you just think my God, how weird is that?

Claire: The whole thing’s weird and here we are, we’re squaring the circle, here we are sitting here back here.