**Content warning:** cancer, delayed diagnosis, terminal illness, anticipatory grief, death, young children and bereavement.
When Ross Cracknell’s wife Steph began experiencing persistent pain in her back and hip, they knew something wasn’t right.
Steph was young, fit, healthy and rarely went to the doctor. But as the pain continued and worsened, she repeatedly sought medical help. Again and again, they were reassured that it was muscular.
Then Steph started losing the sight in one eye.
What followed was devastating. A tumour was discovered in her eye and further scans revealed cancer throughout her body. The primary cancer was in her lung and, by the time it was found, her illness was already incurable.
In this episode of **Widowed AF**, Ross joins Rosie to tell Steph’s story, from meeting at school as teenagers and travelling Australia together, to marriage, moving to the Isle of Man and becoming parents to Ada and Otis.
“All she ever wanted was to be a mother,” Ross says. And she was a brilliant one.
Ross talks candidly about the anger he still carries over the months Steph spent asking for help, and the questions he now lives with about whether things could have been different.
But this is also a conversation about what happens when you are told the person you expected to grow old with is going to die.
Ross describes the moment he realised their future had disappeared, supporting Steph through terminal illness while trying to keep life normal for their children, and the strange experience of beginning to grieve someone while they are still beside you.
Now, a year after Steph’s death, Ross is navigating life as a widowed dad while keeping her firmly present in the lives of the children she loved so fiercely.
This is a conversation about love, anger, anticipatory grief, fatherhood and the enormous adjustment of building a life you never expected to be living.
