Series Special Happya Ever After: My Story: From Survival to Happya Finding a Way Forward After Losing My Husband

In this opening episode of Happya Ever After, Clare Deacon shares her personal story of life after the sudden death of her husband not by retelling the traumatic event, but by speaking honestly about what came after.

This episode is about the early shock, the long middle where survival stopped working, and the quiet, difficult process of finding a way forward when the future you planned no longer exists.

Clare speaks openly about:

• The numbness and disorientation of early grief
• Functioning on the outside while falling apart inside
• The pressure to “perform” grief for others
• The moment survival stopped being enough
• Why this experience led to the creation of Happya Ever After

This is not a story of fixing grief or moving on.

It’s a story of living through loss, finding agency again, and choosing a different narrative one that allows grief and hope to exist side by side.

This episode anchors the heart of the series and explains who Happya Ever After is for: those who have survived loss and are quietly wondering if there is another way to live.

Explore the Happya Ever After hub: https://happyacoach.com/happya-ever-after

Free guide – Life After Loss: Finding a Way Forward:
https://happyacoach.com/happya-ever-after/life-after-loss

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🎵 Music by LemonMusicStudio

Transcript

Hello, and welcome to Happya Ever After.

Before we go any further, I want to say something important.

This series talks openly about life after the death of a partner.
There are no graphic details, but please listen in a way that feels supportive for you.

This episode is not about the moment my husband died.
 It’s not about reliving that night.
 And it’s not about details that could be distressing or overwhelming.

This episode is about what came after.

About the journey of surviving loss, living through the long middle, and slowly finding a way forward when the life you planned no longer exists.

I’m sharing my story here not because it’s unique, and not because it’s the most important one in the room but because it’s the reason this series exists.

And because I want you to know, from the very beginning, that I’m not speaking to you from theory.

I’m speaking to you from lived experience, reflection, and years of walking alongside others in this space.

My husband died suddenly from a cardiac arrest at home.
 There was no warning. No illness. No gradual adjustment.

One ordinary day, we were a family moving through the rhythms of work, school, and evening routines and the next, my entire world had changed.

I’m not going to describe that night in detail.

What matters is not the event itself, but what it did to my body, my mind, and my sense of reality afterwards.

In the early weeks, shock dominated everything.

Not shock as an idea but shock as a physical state.

My body shut down.
 My brain didn’t function properly.
 I couldn’t read words and make sense of them.
 Conversations washed over me as if I were underwater.

People would speak, and I could hear them, but I couldn’t always process what they were saying.

I didn’t understand then that this was my nervous system doing exactly what it needed to do to survive something overwhelming.

At the time, it just felt frightening.

Alongside the numbness, there was hypervigilance.

An intense, all-consuming need to protect my children.

I had one job, as far as my system was concerned:
 keep them safe.
 meet every need.
 prevent any further harm.

There was no space for my own grief in those early weeks.

Survival took over.

I also became acutely aware of being watched.

Watched for how I responded.
 Watched for how I behaved.
 Watched for whether I was grieving in the “right” way.

At the time, I didn’t have language for this but I now understand how much pressure there is on bereaved people to perform grief.

To look devastated, but not too devastated.
 To cope, but not too well.
 To be strong, but not unsettlingly functional.

I was functioning because I didn’t know how not to.

Not because I was okay.

People slowly returned to their day-to-day lives as they should.

They went back to work, to routine, to normality.

And I wanted that for them.

But I couldn’t perform the reassurance many of them needed the reassurance that it was all going to be okay, that life could simply resume.

Because for me, nothing had resumed.

The funeral happened.
 The children returned to school.
 The administrative tasks reduced.

And then… there was space.

And that space was terrifying.

Because suddenly I was left with the question:

What now?
What does a future look like when the one I planned has vanished?

This is the phase we rarely talk about.

The long middle.

The point where survival is no longer enough but nothing has replaced it yet.

It was also the phase where disbelief took hold.

How could this have happened?
 Why us?
 Why now?
 Why was I not allowed a “happily ever after”?

I had the sense that I had been fighting all my life and here I was again, facing something I had no consent in and no control over.

Support, in a meaningful sense, was limited.

What was available to me didn’t meet me where I was.

And so I carried on until carrying on became unsustainable.

There were moments of profound despair.

Moments where the weight of living this life felt unbearable.

I won’t go into detail here because what matters is not how dark it got, but that it did.

And that I needed help.

There was a moment where I recognised that I was slipping too far and that recognition mattered.

Help came.

And I remain deeply grateful for that.

Looking back now, there were two moments quiet at the time that became anchors for everything that followed.

The first was a promise.

Sitting with my husband after he had died, I made him a promise.

I didn’t know how I would do it.
 I had no plan.
 No clarity.

But I promised that our dreams for our children would still come true.

That his death would not be the end of their happiness.
 That this would not define how his life was remembered.

The second moment came later after survival had begun to collapse.

I caught my own reflection and said, very simply:

I have a choice.

I could give up and live in this state or I could fight.

And if I was going to fight, I was going to do it my way.

Not by pretending.
 Not by bypassing grief.
 Not by becoming who others expected me to be.

But by finding a way to live that was honest, integrated, and sustainable.

At the time, I didn’t call this hope.

It didn’t feel hopeful.

It felt necessary.

I found my way into therapy early on, driven by desperation rather than insight.

I went in with the mindset of:
 Tell me what to do, and I’ll do it.

I didn’t care how hard it was nothing could be worse than how I felt.

What I didn’t understand then was that I didn’t need more thinking.

I needed to feel.

I needed to hear my own voice.

And I needed to work not just on what had happened but on everything that had led me to this point.

There was so much unprocessed history, trauma, and identity that needed attention.

Not to dwell in it but to integrate it.

As I moved forward, I became increasingly aware of how limited the support landscape was.

How outdated some approaches were.
 How often people were taken back into their trauma and left there.

What I came to call the “trauma swamp”.

Endless revisiting.
 Little integration.
 No future orientation.

There were plenty of people willing to sit in pain.

Very few who could hold grief alongside hope.

And I needed hope.

Not false hope.
 Not positivity.
 But the belief that this was not the end of my story.

That I still had agency.
 Choice.
 Identity.

Happya was born from that gap.

I left a career I no longer loved because life was too short to keep performing a role that no longer fit.

I returned to university, drawn by curiosity about how healing actually works not just emotionally, but neurologically, psychologically, and relationally.

And in learning about post-traumatic growth, something clicked.

Not in a dramatic way.

But in a grounded, quiet sense of purpose.

This is why I’m here.

Not to minimise grief.
 Not to rush anyone forward.
 Not to suggest that loss is something to “get over”.

But to offer a different narrative.

One where grief and growth can coexist.
 Where sadness does not become your entire identity.
 Where you are allowed to build a life from the rubble taking what matters, leaving what doesn’t.

Happya is not one thing.

For some, it’s getting out of bed.
 For others, it’s starting again.
 For others, it’s choosing peace, rest, or meaning.

It’s about next steps not giant leaps.

This series is for those who have stabilised enough to ask:

Is this really it?
Is there another way to live with this?

Not defined by time but by state.

If that’s you, you’re in the right place.

This series exists because I refused to believe that trauma is the end of the story.

And because I know from lived experience that survival is not the same as living.

You don’t need to forget.
 You don’t need to minimise what you’ve lost.
 And you don’t need to be “over it”.

But you are allowed to live forward.

That’s what Happya Ever After is about.

And I’m very glad you’re here.