During the first year after my husband died I had a compulsive urge to talk about him and I had two very good Dutch friends who were patient listeners, sitting on the sand with our feet in the sea when we went to the beach twice a week. I began my story from when Dudley and I met in 1953 at The Evening News and continued through our 43 years of life together. This took ten months and while I could hear myself talking, I could not stop. Later when I mentioned this to a friend who is a nursing sister and had suffered as a widow before she remarried, she told me this is called "the crazy widow's syndrome" and a far better way to work through one's grief than holding it all back. How fortunate I am to have such good friends. At the end of the first year I visited my family in Australia, a long journey from St Martin in the Caribbean. But when I returned, although half of me still seemed missing, I did feel ready to face life on my own and carry on. Crazy or not, I decided to write a book about my life with Dudley.
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