As I boarded a plane bound for Portugal’s capital at the end of October 2021, I felt a bittersweet pang. I ought to have been overjoyed about finally making the leap and emigrating, and part of me was – after seven years of living in London, I’d long grown tired of its endless grey skies. I’d dreamed of living somewhere like Lisbon instead, where the summers seemed to last for ever and every building is painted in pastels the colours of ice cream. What I hadn’t imagined, though, was ever doing it alone.
Moving abroad was something my fiancé Ben and I had often talked about. We’d spin fantasies about living on a farmstead in the Balearics, surrounded by Bougainvillaea, after doing our time in the Big Smoke. We’d delayed it to some nebulous ”someday” in the future that we believed we’d eventually reach. But in March 2020, as the world was brought to a standstill by the Covid pandemic, a routine follow-up scan upended it all – the cancer that had been removed from his back the previous summer had spread to his lungs. It was terminal, the doctors said.
I stumbled out of the hospital that afternoon in a daze. We had been together for five blissful years since I was 24. How would I carry on living in the absence of the person I knew I couldn’t live without? I simply wouldn’t. Besides, there was so much to live for still. Marriage, babies, a move abroad – we had plans.
Over the next few months, we explored every viable treatment option, but the disease continued to ravage his body with merciless speed. Eventually, his oncologist advised us to “make arrangements” – in other, less palatable words, organise end of life care and wait for him to die.
Desperate to save his life and salvage the future we had envisioned, we travelled to an alternative cancer treatment centre in Tijuana, Mexico, the following week. Miraculously, the treatment was working – but his condition started to deteriorate one morning five weeks in. He was rushed to hospital with breathing difficulties and placed into a medically induced coma. A PCR test confirmed that he had contracted Covid.
During visiting hours, I read out loud the diary entries I’d written from my future self as I sat beside his bed; reflecting on our wedding day in Formentera, lazy Sundays at the farmstead. I stuck dozens of photos on the wall opposite him – photos of us hiking in Yosemite, swimming in tropical sinkholes – memories of better times. He’d see them once he was awake, I reasoned. It would give him something to look forward to and work towards. Only he never woke up. He died on the 14 November, 2020 from complications attributed to cancer and Covid. As I kissed him goodbye for the final time through a hazmat suit and latex gloves, I made him a promise: “if not with you, then for you”.
For the next four months, I lived with my mum and step dad as I attempted to pick up the pieces of my life. It felt so small and insufferable for so long, that, by the following spring, I craved novelty. I wanted to remember what it had felt like to be a normal, 34-year-old woman before cancer, caregiving and grief had consumed her. Come May, the lockdowns throughout the UK were beginning to lift, and travel was permitted to certain countries. Eager to lift my spirits, a friend suggested we book a long weekend in Lisbon.
As we navigated the winding, cobbled streets together a few weeks later, the smell of custard pastries wafting from nearby pastelarias, I felt a flicker of something inside me that I hadn’t felt in months; hope. Everything felt different – lighter, freer, happier. And I felt lighter, freer, happier. I could live here, I thought. The city was undeniably beautiful, with its crumbling mansions painted lemon yellow and pistachio green. But more than that, there was a strange comfort in being somewhere completely new, a place unburdened by memories of a life that no longer was.
The choice to move would obviously come with setbacks. It would mean leaving behind a support system of family and friends, stepping away from everything that felt familiar at a time when I felt most vulnerable. But it would also offer me an entirely blank canvas, on which I could repaint my life. What had I got to lose, I asked myself, when I had already lost so much?
I’d planned to move by the end of the summer, but shortly after I arrived home to England, another devastating blow hit. My dad was diagnosed with stage four cancer and Alzheimer’s. He was gone by mid September.
Two profound losses in under a year left me reeling, desperate for something to change. I knew it was now, or maybe never, to move. The evening after dad’s funeral, I booked a one-way ticket to Lisbon, due to leave at the end of the month. With my family’s help, I cleared out mine and Ben’s flat in Finsbury Park, filling half a dozen suitcases with my belongings and scattering what remained across every charity shop within a mile.
Grief, I quickly realised, is not something you leave behind when you change postal codes. It travels with you, unpacking itself in unexpected moments. There were days not long after I arrived when the beauty of Lisbon felt like an affront – how dare the world be so gorgeous when Ben wasn’t here to see it? Yet, gradually, I found myself able to hold both my joy and my grief, to embrace the present while honouring the past. I discovered purpose in writing and helping others navigate loss. I moved into a beautiful apartment, made new friends, and eventually, found love again.
As my relationship with my new partner grew deeper, I made a surprising discovery: loving him didn’t lessen my love for Ben. Instead, it celebrated the boundless capacity for love that Ben had nurtured in me. These loves can exist alongside one another, I learned – just like my joy and grief can.
Three years have passed since I left London. And truth be told, in many ways, I am happier now than I’ve ever been. As I sit here sipping the dregs of my ice latte at a quaint cafe overlooking Lisbon’s old town, Graça, I wonder whether I ought to have done it sooner – not just after losing Ben, but even before. Why do we so often wait for a wake-up call to pursue the things we really want in life? Perhaps it’s fear, or inertia, or the mistaken belief that we have all the time in the world.
My losses taught me some hard-won lessons: that life as we know it can be torn from us in an ordinary instant, and that “someday” isn’t guaranteed. In losing my fiancé, I gained a fierce determination to live fully and authentically. Moving to Lisbon wasn’t about running away from my grief, but about running towards a life that felt true to who I am and what he and I had aspired towards. To me, that’s the greatest way to honour the people we’ve lost.
Bittersweet by Lotte Bowser is published on 1 October (£8.99, Little A)
