I felt I was losing myself. I said I wanted to retrain and go back to work, which caused endless rows. He was very controlling and even wanted to dictate which friends I saw. The boys were suffering. They used to say to me: “How do you put up with the way Dad speaks to you?” I worried they were losing respect for me. Then I found a flirty text on his phone – classic. It was from his head of marketing, a bright, very pretty young woman I’d never liked. We had a massive row; he said I was clearly mad and suffering from an early menopause, and he stormed out. He never came back.

The split was long and acrimonious, with the boys caught in the middle. I moved from the big, ostentatious house I had never liked into a cottage with the boys, and he bought an even larger house with a swimming pool to live in with Caitlin. I felt thrown away, and I lost all confidence in myself. Without the boys, I don’t know how I would have survived.

Our contact was sporadic, and only to do with arrangements for the boys. Financial matters were dealt with by the lawyers, and he was very generous. After a year of pulling myself together I went back to work, started to see more of my friends, made new friends and was even seeing, tentatively, a new partner who was a widower and a nice, kind man who shared my love of walking. Life had settled into a new, lower-key rhythm.

Then I got the phone call that changed everything. It was Caitlin, and she was curt. “It’s Michael. I think you should know and tell the boys. He’s had a bleed on the brain and he is in hospital. If the boys” – she stressed this – “want to visit him, he is asking for them. I will text you the visiting hours.”

“Is he going to live?” I asked. But she had already finished the call.

To my amazement, I burst into tears.

Tears for the years

It was Caitlin’s tone that got me. When she called she wasn’t even crying – it was as if his illness was an annoying inconvenience. She’d even said, “And we were due to go on holiday next week.”

I later found out that Michael’s business was in some kind of trouble and losing money. It was possibly stress and high blood pressure that caused the aneurysm to rupture. Also Michael was now obsessed with fitness and had been training for a marathon.

After he came home from hospital, the boys said everyone was assuming he would recover – but I had a feeling deep inside that he might not. I had to see him, even if it was just one last time. I texted Caitlin and eventually, after the boys badgered her, she said I could visit.

Just being in their house made me so sad – it was so unlike Michael. Our old house had been full of books, slightly shabby but well-loved, but this felt like a show home: everything was immaculate but so very bling. There was nothing of the ‘home’ about it.

Michael was in bed, propped up by pillows. When I saw him, the years just fell away. Oddly he looked younger – thin and wasted, yes, but much more like the young man I had first met. He looked at me, and started crying. That startled me – I’d never seen him cry before. I sat down and held his hand. “Hello, you,” I said. “Hello, you,” he replied. There was no awkwardness. We talked, and talked – about my life, about the boys, about friends we had in common. We didn’t mention Caitlin or his child with her. Eventually there was a knock on the door, and Caitlin came in – with a face like thunder. I think she had been listening at the door. Immediately, she became very bossy, plumping his pillows, straightening the sheets, telling him off for not taking his pills, asking what he wanted for dinner. Her back was to me and her intention was clear. Get out. This is MY husband.

I drove home in floods of tears. I told myself to remember how vile he had been, how we wanted different things, how he’d pushed me out, how he’d rushed off with Caitlin and thrown me aside. “But he’s the same person,” I thought. “Underneath it all, he is the same.”

My tears were mostly for myself and the waste. The waste of our life together, all those years, the waste of not growing old together, pottering around the garden, going grey and not caring. Not needing to keep up appearances or be anything we weren’t. Not needing to pretend to be young.

Over the next few weeks I popped in to see him when I was allowed, and we never ran out of things to say. His face lit up when I walked in the door of his bedroom. Once I heard Caitlin on the phone to a friend, through the closed kitchen door, saying “I didn’t sign up for this”.

I had to stop myself from fantasising. That somehow, he could come back to me. Maybe not now, but maybe in years to come when Caitlin grew fed up with being with such an older man. When he needed me again.

Still my husband, in my memory

But then I got another call. He had been found unconscious in bed that morning, and he was back in hospital. It was another bleed. This time Caitlin sounded frantic and even a bit unhinged. She kept repeating: “He can’t die. I can’t cope.” I even felt sorry for her.

I called Caitlin and tried to organise a rota of visits. I really did not want us all crowded around the bed, as the atmosphere would have been awful. But she ignored me, so I called in to the hospital – I didn’t ask permission, I just went. We didn’t talk much, but we had a few precious hours together and then he asked me to bring in our old photo albums. It sounds crazy but I knew this was his way of saying goodbye. And that he was, finally, sorry. We spent a lovely afternoon looking at pictures the next day, reminiscing about friends we had known and places we had visited together. Silly family jokes we had shared. He was very weak and frail, and it broke my heart.

Once the consultant came in and, embarrassingly, took me for Michael’s current wife as we looked so close. I followed him out and asked the prognosis and he shook his head.

Neither of us was there when Michael died, in the middle of the night, and I hate the fact that he died alone. My job then was to console the boys, and I tried not to rationalise my own profound grief. I felt mentally and physically floored.

I was barred from the funeral. The boys were invited, but they refused to go. We had our own little ceremony in the garden. We said a few prayers, and then I raised a glass of wine to him. My husband. Still my husband, in my memory.

There’s now a battle over the will, as she is contesting the legacy for the boys. I don’t want anything. I have to stop torturing myself with questions and what-ifs. I have to accept the choices he made and try not to mourn for the life we could have had.

Although I always will.

*Names and professions have been changed

– As told to Diana Appleyard