Widows and widowers talk about the pain of the “firsts” without their late partner – anniversaries, birthdays, major life events.
Andrew thought he would be celebrating Zoë’s 39th birthday on 23 December, quickly followed by the glorious chaos of Christmas with family, friends and their boys’ wide-eyed excited innocence.
The couple met by chance in September 2014 after independently booking a cycling holiday in Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam.
Andrew remembers the first time they met, thinking: “Wow – she is amazing!”
He adds: “I guess the beauty of a cycling holiday is that you have to look ahead – you can’t look at the person – you just talk and we talked and we hit it off.”
The young couple knew it was meant to be, and Andrew soon moved from Abu Dhabi to be with Zoë in Manchester, a city where he did not know anybody else.
“It’s what you dream of,” he says. “You know you’ve got this person who understands you, believes in you, accepts you, loves you, lets you be yourself and you learn that as your relationship grows.”
They moved in together before getting married in May 2017, enjoying what Andrew describes as “the perfect life – on Fridays we went to restorative yoga after work and then have a restorative pint on the way home”.
After struggling to conceive naturally and a failed course of IVF, their dream of having children finally came true when Zoë became pregnant with Joey, who was born in April 2021. Little brother Tommy followed in June 2023.