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“Ben and I always had big plans for our future, how we’d give our kids experiences we’d never had and grab life with both hands,” Karen says.
The couple had their daughter Georgina two years later. “We felt simply blessed – and then when we found out we were expecting again and could complete our family, it was simply magical.”
But just five years after they exchanged their vows, they received news that would shatter their family irreparably. Ben, who was just 38, was diagnosed with stage four bowel cancer
Karen, meanwhile, was pregnant with their second child Harriet. “It just seemed so unfair, so cruel, like some horrific dream,” Karen, now 46, recalls.
The building company manager was adamant he wouldn’t let the cancer win, refusing to write any goodbye letters or bucket-lists, firmly telling Karen every day he was going nowhere.
“Ben never once entertained the idea that the chemo wouldn’t work and he tried his best to get on with normal life,” she says. “He had his chemo every two weeks, and would feel awful for 5-7 days, then go back to being his old self briefly before being hit with the next wave of treatment. But there are limits to what modern medicine can do.”
A scan over Christmas 2016 showed that the tumour was growing back, fast. When Karen went into labour, Ben left intensive chemo to be with her as Harriet was born before returning to treatment.
But he continued to go downhill - chemo stopped working and radiotherapy didn’t help, just causing pain and making him more frail.
In August of 2017, Karen finally said her final goodbyes in a hospice close to their home in Harlow, Essex.
“I was breast-feeding Harriet when a paramedic asked if I’d like him to resuscitate my husband should he go into cardiac arrest. My first instinct was to shout ‘Of course!’, but I knew the reality was that Ben was dying and in pain. I remember the tears falling on to our daughter’s face.
“He was so weak at the end he couldn’t talk, so he couldn’t even say goodbye to the kids.”
Ben died a month before his 40th birthday, leaving Karen a widowed mother of two small children at the age of 38.
“Nothing can soften the blow that I knew was coming, nothing can prepare you,” she says. “When you wake up and realise your husband is just not there, that he’s gone forever. Everything changes, like a tsunami hitting you smack-bang in your heart, and the waves reverberating through every layer of your being.
“Georgina started reception that September, the day after what would’ve been Ben’s 40th birthday.
“She had play therapy, which might have helped, but kids are amazingly resilient anyway. She was told endlessly it’s okay to not be okay, which is a good message.
“But over the coming months and years, she’d see friends with two parents, the usual family units, and be reminded their dad was gone. I just felt so powerless to help, I didn’t have any answers.
“I lived my life going through the motions, doing what I had to. I got up, got the children up, I got dressed, got the children dressed, fed them, washed them, took them places.
“People tell you to reach out for help, but when you’re there, you don’t know how to. It’s one moment, one breath at a time.”
Karen had counselling from the hospice for a few months, but it was the organisation Widowed and Young (WAY), which made her feel less alone. “There were live meet-ups, times when you could sit and listen, or be listened to, by someone who actually knew what you meant when you said you didn’t know how you could go on without your partner.”
She became an organiser for WAY, helping initiate new members and running online group chats. “It gave me a function away from being a mum. I still felt broken, but not alone,” she says.
Karen, who had worked as an environmental chemist, knew she didn’t want to go back to that career and she retrained as a life coach. “I felt like somehow, I had to channel any new vocation around our new life,” she says. “I started using tools and strategies like hypnotherapy, reiki, emotional freedom techniques like tapping and finding energy meridians.
“For a trained scientist it was a real step out of my usually conservative world, but it was about helping to heal myself while I helped others. And it gave me the flexibility to be the mum my kids needed.”
Moving back to Cumbria in January 2022, where she grew up, to be close to her parents was the next step in her healing.
“I felt I wanted to be back in nature,” Karen says. “It synced with my new career, immersing myself in the outdoors. I wanted to live by the sea, with a beach to sit and walk on in the morning and evening, watching the tides go in and out. It was a reminder that we’re part of something bigger than ourselves, a connection with the earth.
“I also picked up a pad and pencil for the first time in decades and started drawing as a way of clearing my head. Then I started collecting old pieces of worn sea glass, along with driftwood from the beach, and made little sculptures.
“Those pieces of glass and wood seemed to be analogous to my life, picking up something that had been thrown away, battered and chipped, but made beautiful again by nature.
“Simply getting creative, using my hands and switching off from all the other crap in life became my healing, a therapy more valuable than any of the counselling I’d had.”
She now runs classes for other people who’ve been bereaved. “Each month around 10 of us gather for a few hours to sit, create, chat and just get away from all the other stuff going on.
“I know that together we’re so much stronger than we could imagine. I’ve even recently managed to get grant funding for the group – which is free to everyone – so we can expand it.”
Karen’s life now is rooted in her family and the natural environment around her. “I find my joy in the sea, wild swimming and walking with my children and dogs along a tranquil beach. This magical space keeps me grounded and reminds me nothing is permanent; everything changes,” she says.
“I’ve learned that it’s possible to allow yourself to feel the warmth of the sun even as waves of grief still wash through you.”
Karen Whybrow is a coach who specialises in grief and finding joy, visit karenwhybrow.com.
English (US) ·