A FIRST time mum who became a widow at the age of 38 has paid thanks to a lifeline support group at the hospice where her husband died one year ago.

Pippa Howard felt isolated and alone after the loss of her partner Stuart on January 3, 2015. Suddenly a single parent to their daughter Adelaide, now aged three, Pippa joined a new group for young widows and widowers at St Peter’s Hospice.

“People say to me I know how you feel,” said Pippa, of Littledean in Yate. “I want to say to them, you tell me what qualifies you to know how on earth I feel.

“But with the group they do understand and that has helped me.”

Pippa, who works in the stationery department of John Lewis at The Mall at Cribbs Causeway, met Stuart through the Yate and Chipping Sodbury division of St John’s Ambulance where they both volunteered.

They married and despite not ever planning to have children, the couple had Adelaide in 2013. But when she was just three months old, Stuart was rushed into hospital with profuse bleeding in the same ambulance he had just finished using during a shift with St John’s.

He was quickly diagnosed with bowel cancer but was given good chances of recovery. However, after further tests, Stuart, a self-employed private carer, was given the damning diagnosis that he had genetic condition Familial Adenomatous Polyposis (FAP), which his mother is thought to have died from at the age of 37, and even worse, he had particularly aggressive tumours associated with FAP.

“He had no idea,” said Pippa. “We didn’t know his mother’s history until just before the diagnosis. If they had known he would have been prodded and poked for 20 years and been operated on in his twenties whereas Stuart had 36 years of doing what he liked.”

Stuart spent almost all of 2014 in hospital, undergoing hours and hours of surgery.

“He was in and out of hospital for anything from two days to two weeks,” said Pippa. “At the time you just get on with it and I had a spreadsheet on who was looking after Adelaide and who was visiting Stuart.

“One of the hardest things was he loved doing bedtime and morning stuff with Adelaide and he said to me once, we didn’t really want children but I love being a daddy.”

Stuart was told his prognosis was terminal in July 2014 and was admitted to St Peter’s Hospice in Brentry, Bristol on December 15.

“In hospital Adelaide wasn’t allowed into the ward but in the hospice she could sit on his bed,” said Pippa. “It was so welcoming and friendly and although Stuart said he didn’t want to go to a hospice because he associated it with old people, he knew it was the right thing for us.”

Stuart died on January 3, 2015 and was cremated in his favourite Levellers T-shirt. A technology fan, he wrote letters to his daughter on his iPad while in the hospice for her to read when she is older.

“There are times when I feel angry with him,” added Pippa. “I didn’t sign up to be a single parent and I swear at him as I didn’t want to do potty training alone.

“We were meant to grow old together.

"There is a 50 per cent chance Adelaide will have FAP but I have shut that out for now, there is only so much you can deal with."

Pippa, now 39, returns to the hospice once a month to chat to other widows and widowers in the support group.

“There are seven of us all with children,” she said.

“We are all at different stages of our journeys but we have similar experiences and stories, none are exactly the same but they know how I feel and have helped with advice or just been there with a little text on our first Christmas without Stuart or the anniversary.

“It has helped me a lot.”