TRUE-LIFE
I discovered it’s never too late for happiness Alice Palmer, 70, Liverpool
Stood outside the pub, it was all I could do not to turn and run. In April 1997, I was 43, a newly divorced mum of three.
My sisters Tina, then 36, and Fiona, 35, had encouraged me out on a blind date.
‘You only live once,’ Tina had said.
‘Make the most of it,’ Fiona chimed in.
They’d shoved me out the door, and I’d made it to the pub to meet this John.
I took a deep breath, walked in and… wow.
John, then 38, was tall, with gorgeous grey eyes.
‘You must be Alice,’ he said, with a cheeky grin.
I learned that he had a sense of humour, too.
At the end of the night, he leaned against a smart blue Land Rover in the road, but didn’t get in.
‘I can’t drive,’ he admitted. ‘I borrowed this from a mate to impress you!’
As our relationship grew, I introduced him to my kids Brett, 23, Lauren, 8, and Jon, 5, who loved him.
John longed for kids. Only, I was heading towards the menopause.
Yet a year and a half after we met, I fell pregnant.
‘I’ve never seen a man so happy,’ I teased John.
‘I’ve never been so happy,’ he replied.
Everything was working out.
Then, during labour, in August 1999, our baby, named Beth, was starved of oxygen.
Doctors saved her, but she was left with severe cerebral palsy.
‘She’ll never walk, talk or see,’ the doctor warned me and John. ‘And we don’t know how long she’ll live.’
Suddenly the future felt terrifying, but we knew one thing for sure.
Whatever she faced, Beth would be loved.
Especially by her daddy. Back home, John didn’t care that Beth didn’t meet her milestones.
‘I couldn’t have wished for a better kid,’ he told me.
Never taking her first steps, Beth was using a wheelchair by age 3.
She never had a first word, but she loved music.
I’d hold her hands and clap to Destiny’s Child, Katy Perry, Rihanna.
Cuddling Beth, John would sing along, both of them beaming.
Beth started at the Royal School for the Blind, where her lovely smile won everyone’s hearts.
For many years life was hard, but so happy.
But one morning in March 2019, Beth, then 19, wasn’t smiling as usual. ‘She looks like she’s in pain,’ John told me.
Our chats felt like a lifeline and my feelings deepened
We took her to the doctors, who couldn’t work out what was wrong.
Weeks on, John, then 61, started getting pain too, in his stomach. Tests led to a diagnosis. Liver cancer.
I was
