I haven’t written an update for a while, and to be honest, I’ve been enjoying getting back to normality (and trying to learn how to parent teenagers), with limited success. I think that writing Fanny through my grief and treatment was my way of releasing stress when I had nobody else to tell. Now, I do have someone to tell, who loves me deeply, but with that happiness and contentment has come a bit of Writers’ Block. Our stories don’t end as long as we’re alive, but perhaps I wanted Fanny to have her happy ending, and I wasn’t sure if there really was any such thing.

In fact, I suppose I thought a new beginning had come instead – in July last year, when my husband’s ashes were interred in the graveyard of the church where he and I had married 15 years before, almost to the day. I’d just finished my cancer treatment, and had decided that – having held my hand through it in the only way he could – it was time to let him rest. (Stick with this – it gets progressively less depressing, I promise.)

That day, for me, was a marker. I knew that I would be on my own from the moment we’d placed him in the ground. I’d spent the 15 months since his death holding on to what was left of him, but I knew that my future – whatever it held – could not include my husband as a living, breathing companion. I was ready for a future without cancer, but I wasn’t quite ready for anyone else to take his place. I still didn’t consider myself to be a single woman (as opposed to a woman who was married, but whose husband just wasn’t alive any more), but I suppose I needed to make peace with the fact that a different guy may one day end up by my side. It’s what my husband had said he eventually wanted for me after (and I quote) “a suitable period of mourning”, followed by the inevitable smirk and a wink. The idea of letting him go was as frightening as it was strangely liberating.

I’ve already written about how I met the New Chap, so I won’t go over it again (suffice to say that it involved a large amount of encouragement from my children, and an even larger amount of wine), but the short story is that we began communicating on an internet dating site which I’d joined, primarily to shut up the children, a couple of months after my husband’s ashes had been interred. Not being remotely experienced in the world of dating, my opening gambit was to send him a message to say that I’d noticed he didn’t look mad, and unlike the rest of my potential matches, he only lived up the road.

When I’d originally made contact, he was part way through running an ultra marathon in the Swiss Alps, but we’d managed to exchange some epic banter in the few moments he could snatch in between running and sleeping. We got on well, and I was pleased to be able to continue the conversation by asking him for some advice about training for my own forthcoming marathon. Only when I’d berated him for a misplaced apostrophe did I realise that his utterly perfect response confirmed his place in Pedants’ Corner, and therefore as a potentially ideal partner. I was just a bit worried that his enthusiasm for athleticism might not be entirely compatible with my somewhat battered and butchered body.

A few days later, when he was back home, 13.1 miles away (precisely a half marathon distance, as it happens), we arranged to meet. I hadn’t expected to date anyone so soon, so I’d had to come clean about the slight Trades Descriptions issue of my profile picture, which wrongly suggested that I might have a full set of boobs, and perhaps some hair. Meanwhile, he’d had to admit that he usually went for blondes with big tits, was about five years older than his profile suggested, and had had little success in the marriage department. Not to worry, I said – I could offer a wildcard option regarding hair and tits, and 48-year-old twice divorced men are exactly my type. Marrying one had worked very well for me many years earlier, so why change the habit of a lifetime? (Next time, hopefully, I’ll be a cougar and snare one from my nursing home.)

He’d only been to my neighbourhood once before (there would never have been a good reason for him to come here, as it’s not on his route to work, and all we have to offer are reservoirs, Brexiteers, and Morrisons). However, our local pub/restaurant was the halfway point between his house and that of a woman he’d met online a few weeks earlier, and after exchanging a string of messages, they’d met there one Saturday night for a pleasant but ultimately unsuccessful date. It also happens to be the pub where we’d held my husband’s wake, and which is directly opposite the church where we’d got married, had his funeral, and where his ashes are now interred. It didn’t seem right for either of us to meet there. So, instead, we arranged to meet for lunch in the small market town half way between our houses. But when the New Chap did what all good internet daters do, and web stalked me, he was shocked. My husband’s death had made the news. New Chap remembered seeing the story. He’d read it in the paper. It had massively resonated with him at the time, and he didn’t know why, but there was something about our story that had grabbed him, and he’d never forgotten it. When my husband died, the New Chap was still married, but he’d been separated for almost a year by the time he tentatively started dating again – beginning with the woman he’d met at my local pub.

We both thought this could be a sign that my husband had sent him to me. Of course, we’ll never know. The good news, though, is that our first date went very well. As did the second… and the third… etc.

Over the last year, we’ve grown to love each other so much. We’ve become each other’s best friend, and can’t imagine life without one other. We both look forward to a future of growing old together. The only thing that holds me back is my often overwhelming fear of him dying… but that’s probably understandable. What’s lovely is that the boys really seem to adore him, and I think the world of his kids too. My twins and his teenage daughter consider themselves to be siblings (and simultaneously love and hate each other accordingly), and when his two little boys are with us, it’s a breath of silliness and fresh air which was desperately needed in the house which has seen such pain and trauma. What’s even more wonderful is that my husband is always part of the conversation, and New Chap doesn’t feel threatened by his memory – he just wishes they’d met each other. So do I.

The other week, I was scrolling through the New Chap’s Strava feed (that’s Facebook for athletes) to see if I could see his epic Alpine run from last year. I was trying to work out exactly when we’d first made contact. I knew it had been sometime in September, but that was it. Having found the maps and noted the date, I carried on idly scrolling back. A little further down the feed, I saw a map of a route that he’d cycled a few weeks before he’d left for the Alps. It went from his house in the hills down to my neck of the woods, and because we’ve both now cycled and run that very route together several times, I recognised it straight away. He’d made the journey on his bike to collect his car from my local pub, where he’d left it after the pleasant but unsuccessful date the previous evening.

According to Strava, he arrived to collect his car on the same day, at exactly the same time, that I’d arrived with my husband’s ashes (in a Bag for Life, obviously, as regular readers will appreciate), ready to say goodbye for ever. At the very moment that I let go of the love of my old life, the love of my new life was right there. We will have passed each other in the street. The New Chap would never have had any reason to return to my neighbourhood after that, if he hadn’t met me online, in the Alps.

Little did he know on that morning, as he reluctantly resumed the search for the woman of his dreams, that she was actually right there: the teary-eyed bald woman with wonky tits, walking over to the church a few feet away, manhandling two bickering twelve-year-olds and a large carrier bag. Meanwhile, she definitely wouldn’t have paid any attention to the mutantly tall Lycra-clad lunatic trying to shoehorn a bicycle around two child seats in the back of a poncey Jaguar. Perhaps it was best that the two of us began to feel a connection in words before we looked for a physical one.

From the start, meeting the New Chap has felt like fate. Losing my husband ripped me in two, but my own cancer episode paved the way for someone other than him to complete the person I became in the time after he died. We can’t help but feel as if someone was trying very hard indeed to put us together at exactly the time when he knew we’d both be ready. The New Chap and I just needed a few more weeks to bump into each other again, when the time was definitely right for both of us.

Even after his death, my husband still manages to be right about everything. He (almost) always was. Fanny, meanwhile, will continue to write about her adventures as the Champion of the World alongside her ever-expanding family, but perhaps Volume One: The Cancer Years has reached a suitable conclusion. The happy ending has just written itself.

Love Fanny x

Photo copyright My Parking Sign