Love and relationships
When Lisa Strutt lost her husband, John, she took his advice and embraced new adventures – with more than a little help from her friends
Pulling on a helmet, knee pads and protective gloves, I was ready to ride my bike through the rough terrain of a forest with my friend Emma Dickson.
When I crashed my bike, cascading over logs and boulders, my arms were scraped and bruised. But with Emma by my side, I was fine. She cleaned me up, made me laugh and we were quickly back on the saddle, ready to continue our adventure. Emma knew that more than anything, I needed to keep on going.
Since losing my husband, John, a year earlier, when he was just 47, my friends had been helping me to follow his wish to celebrate all that life had to offer.
John and I were childhood sweethearts after we meet at a youth camp. After school, I left home in Northern Ireland and went to university in Edinburgh, while John moved to Portsmouth to join the Navy. Many letters were exchanged during our time apart. John was a romantic. Most of the letters said in a thousand ways how much he missed me.
We married in 1997 and moved to Gibraltar for his naval posting. Over the next few years, we had three children, Rosie, James and Holly. John’s career meant we moved around Europe, living in Italy and Portugal. We had adventures and made friends along the way, eventually returning home to Northern Ireland in 2015, where I trained as a leadership coach.
The children were getting older and we had lots of plans to do more together, just the two of us. But on a night out to a concert in November 2017, I noticed that John’s skin looked yellow and he said he didn’t feel well. I insisted he went to see our GP and, after a series of tests, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
He underwent a seven-hour operation a few weeks later, then had to go through eight months of chemotherapy. It seemed to work. We were quietly hopeful. But at a check-up in April 2019, his consultant broke the news that the cancer had returned and was in John’s lymph nodes and his lungs. John had a 50-50 chance of making it through another year. It was a huge shock – just moments before, John had been telling the doctor how well he felt.
John had treatment to stem the growth of his tumours, but his condition deteriorated. His immunity was low, which was a problem when Covid struck. During the early days of the pandemic, we isolated in a flat while the kids stayed at home. We didn’t want to take any risks. It was extremely tough to leave them, but it gave us a chance to be together. We could talk about life and death in a way that many couples never get to do. We knew we’d had the richest of lives together; we’d shown our children what it was like t
