Jamaicans have a word that can mean hello, goodbye or thank you. “Bless-ed,” they say. Our two sons picked it up within days of arriving on the island. In their English toddler accents, the patois sounded comical – but also unexpectedly true.  It was May 2014, and my partner Tony and I were approaching our 10th anniversary together. Our boys, Joe and Jake, were two and four. A year earlier we had moved out of London to a new life, in a 16th-century farmhouse nestled between tumbledown barns and bluebells in rural Kent. And now here we were on holiday in Treasure Beach, a sleepy Jamaican fishing village we loved more than anywhere on Earth. As we sat on the sand, laughing at our boys yelling, “Yo, bless-ed!” I thought we were the luckiest family alive.  Day 10 of the holiday started as peacefully as any other. Waking early on a cloudless Caribbean morning, Tony took a mug of coffee down to a sunlounger on the curl of deserted beach at the bottom of our garden. Jake paddled at the water’s edge a few feet away. Joe was playing in his bedroom, while I began yoga stretches on the deck of our beach cottage.  When I spotted a child’s head bobbing in the ocean, it didn’t occur to me that it might be Jake’s. How could it be? He hadn’t yet learned to swim. I scanned the empty beach idly, wondering where the child’s parents could be. By the time I had realised it was Jake, and begun sprinting to the sea, Tony was already in the water and had our spluttering son in his arms. The momentary panic over, I sank on to the sand with relief, and waited for Tony to swim them back to shore.  But why was Tony calling for help? Why were they drifting farther out to sea? Although choppy, the water wasn’t rough. Confused, I plunged in and was quickly beside them. Taking Jake from Tony, I flipped him on to his back beneath me, cupped his chin with one hand and began swimming for the shore.  Only then did I register the power of the riptide that had swept Jake off his feet. Beneath an apparently benign surface, an undertow had gathered, like a gigantic magnet on the horizon sucking us out to sea. The force of the current took my breath away. But I am a strong swimmer, and sensed no cause for great alarm as we inched our way to safety. On my back, in the soundless calm, all I could see was blue sky. It didn’t even cross my mind to panic.  Wading ashore with Jake in my arms, I turned, expecting to see Tony behind us. But Tony was nowhere near us, not even where I’d left him. He was farther out to sea, much, much farther – maybe 50 feet off shore – floundering in the waves. Three local fishermen were swimming hard towards him, and from houses on either side of our cottage people were streaming on to the beach, shouting for help, hurling life rings and floats towards the swimmers.  It had taken 10 minutes for a fit man to become a corpse. It would take months for me to accept he was never coming back  How had this tranquil little beach assumed the sudden frenzy of emergency? It seemed surreal, almost ridiculous; the scene belonged to a disaster movie, not a family holiday. Even as I paced helplessly, I couldn’t quite take my own fright seriously. Emergencies in real life always turned out to be false alarms, didn’t they? And sure enough, a float reached the fishermen, and soon they had Tony in their arms. A neighbour and I stood in the surf holding the float’s rope, and together we hauled the exhausted tangle of swimmers ashore. The drama was over. In a minute or two Tony would sit up, complain about sand in his ears and ask for a Red Stripe. As the crowd gathered around him, I turned my attention to Jake, who’d not moved from the spot where I had left him. Pale and still, he was staring past my ankles at his father.  “What’s that white stuff coming out of his nose?”  And then I saw it. Two thin streams of foam, like whipped egg white, trickled from Tony’s nostrils. Cold dread wrapped itself around me. The commotion around Tony became frantic; men were pumping his stomach, someone screamed for a doctor, people were pouring on to the beach from every direction. But it was too late. He didn’t move; his eyes remained closed. Seawater had filled his lungs while he was gasping for air in the water. As we were pulling him ashore, he had died.  Sudden death defies the laws of physics; the human mind cannot reconcile the velocity of the first word with the enormity of the second. It is literally incredible. It had taken less than 10 minutes for a fit 49-year-old man to become a corpse, but it would take months for me to accept that he was never coming back. For more than a year, Joe asked me every day to tell him the story again “about how Tony died-ed”; even when he knew the words off by heart, it still sounded as fantastical as Little Red Riding Hood. Even now, I sometimes wonder if I really believe he is dead. But within 24 hours, amid the chaos of shock and confusion, one fact had become incontrovertibly clear in my mind. I knew whose fault it was.  Survivors’ guilt always used to baffle me. Why did people think someone else’s death was their fault; that if only they’d acted differently, they could have prevented it? The illogic seemed so self-evident, and the implicit self-importance rather alienating. But by the time my three brothers and two family friends flew in the following evening, I was convinced they were furious with me.  We sat up late that first night, on the terrace of a friend’s beach house. I tried to explain how Tony had drowned, but kept breaking down, semi-hysterical with self-blame, deaf to all reason or reassurance. Why hadn’t I tried to swim Tony back to shore along with Jake? Why didn’t I swim back to him after saving Jake? How could I not have panicked, even when he was drowning before my eyes? The others’ astonishment at my outburst only made me angry. Why wouldn’t they see – I could have saved him? Come to think of it, if I hadn’t booked this holiday in the first place, he would still be alive. For that matter, he would still be alive if I had never met him. Whichever way you looked at it, if it weren’t for me, Tony would not be dead.  I knew I was becoming increasingly irrational, but could not control the rampaging narrative of guilt – until one brother took my hand and said slowly, gently, as if addressing a small child: “Dec, there was literally nothing you or anyone else could have done to save Tony’s life.” And suddenly I saw that it was true. But instead of relief, what I felt was despair.  I wasn’t, I realised, feeling guilty at all, but creating a parallel universe in which Tony did not have to die, for which taking the blame was a small price to pay. One cannot be a victim if one casts oneself as the culprit, and I suspect this psychological device may explain why Jake exploded three days later, screaming, “I made him dead! I walked into the sea, that’s why he’s dead. It’s all my fault.” To this day, he remains implacably wedded to this self-indictment. He says he likes believing it was his fault, because he would rather face the truth than fall for “a lie made up to make me feel better”. But I suspect it might be less frightening for a six-year-old to tell himself he killed his father than to live in fear of the caprice of bad luck.  I recognised Jake’s choice, because I had made a similar one when I was only three years older than he is now. My mother died of breast cancer when I was nine, and in my mind I reframed her death as a stroke of extraordinary good fortune. I studied other people’s mothers, and pitied their children for being lumbered with such an insufferable intrusion, forever driving them about, cooking their food, helping them with homework, choosing their clothes. I couldn’t think how they could stand it, or believe my luck to be spared this interfering busybody. My own mother’s intense devotion to her four children had been legendary, and was posthumously much praised. To me it sounded intolerably meddlesome, and I thanked my lucky stars to be shot of it.  There must be some truth in the old saying that you make your own luck, for having decided at nine to be lucky, it seemed surprisingly easy to make it true. Exam results were always As, university was a ball, and on graduation I moved into a career on a national newspaper. At 26, I fell in love with a wonderful man. Our wedding was magical, and everyone agreed we made a perfect couple. Even when our marriage went heartbreakingly wrong, I must still have believed I was lucky. If not, I could surely never have left my husband for an ex-con who wholesaled cocaine for a living.  We made an unlikely couple. My world was media London; he had been sentenced to 14 years’ jail in his teens  Tony was our neighbour, and a lifelong criminal who had spent much of his childhood behind bars; in his teens, he was sentenced at the Old Bailey to 14 years for gun crime. Loud, charismatic and good-looking, he was the kind of character anyone would want to have at their party. But to make a life with him? When I walked out of my marriage and we set up home together, everyone thought I must have lost my mind.  In the early years of our relationship, I often thought they might be right. We made an absurdly unlikely couple. My world was media London, his a nocturnal demi-world of shady assignations in pub car parks. A difficult day in my line of work would involve an email argument with a publicist about a tricky interviewee. In his, a violent dispute about the purity of a consignment could wind up with someone in a car boot. Although I loved him with a fierce abandon, any future together looked a very bad bet.  But according to Tony, he was the luckiest man he knew. The mixed-race son of a white 15-year-old girl in non-multicultural 1960s Yorkshire, he could easily have been aborted. The white suburban family who adopted him would have been well within their rights to reject him, after he began burgling houses aged just four (or so he claimed). But since his release from prison, he had not once been reconvicted. Didn’t that prove the gods would always smile on him? “You should write a book about me,” he used to say. “My life would make a wicked book. Come on, you know you’re going to write it one day.” He told me he would change his life for me and, believing himself uniquely blessed by serendipity, he did.  With the haziest notion of what an essay or even a paragraph might look like, Tony enrolled in college, won a scholarship to university, graduated with a first and got a job with Kids Company, mentoring youngsters who reminded him of his old self. By the time he died, Tony and I made a perfectly plausible couple. But in the beginning, reckless faith in our good fortune was probably the one bond we shared.  Eight days after Tony died, we flew home with his body in a coffin, to find a mountain of condolence cards and letters. Moved to tears by words from school friends I’d not seen for decades and from neighbours I barely knew, I wondered why so many people had felt compelled to write. A sudden death galvanises the emotions, but it is the horror of tragedy’s proximity to innocent pleasure we must find so haunting – because all of us can picture ourselves on holiday with our family. The possibility that one of us might not come home seems to evoke the primitive terror of a fairytale.  In the absence of a reason, it can be tempting to form an impression that misfortune was in some obscure way deserved  Tony’s death had been widely reported, and was announced on billboards down our village high street: “Local Man Drowns Saving Son.” This spared me the need to keep breaking the news, but made me cripplingly self-conscious. When I realised I looked like a fright, I wanted to get my eyebrows waxed and do something about my hair. But if I went to the salon in the village, would I look unseemly? I pictured the beautician in the pub, gossiping with disapproving friends about my shocking sense of priorities. I was touched by the postman’s condolences when he delivered the mail, and grateful for his kind words. But then each time he knocked, I couldn’t tell how sad I was supposed to look. If I was always in tears, would my grief begin to look slovenly and unedifying? Perhaps I was expected to pull myself together – but then I fretted he would think me cold and indifferent. Able neither to bear nor escape my new role as the Dramatic Widow, I worried about getting it right.  I thought I was being paranoid, but there were early clues that my self-consciousness was not totally irrational. In Treasure Beach, before the autopsy report confirmed death by drowning, a consensus had quickly formed that Tony had died from a heart attack; a tragedy, still, but reassuringly downgraded from freakish to inevitable. In England, people kept asking if Tony had been drunk when he drowned. The desire for a reason must be a universal longing. In its absence, it can be tempting to form an impression that misfortune was in some obscure way deserved.  No one wants to feel sorry for someone who turns out to disappoint their expectations of widowhood, and by simply being myself I was afraid I might incur disapproval. I felt too vulnerable to risk it. The situation therefore required me to appear blandly virtuous and unobjectionable at all times. What people really wanted I discovered quite by accident, when one of my more Pollyanna-ish friends came to stay.  Telling the truth about how broken I felt was, I soon saw, a mistake; her expression grew increasingly aghast and panic gathered in her eyes. “But of course,” I diverted hastily, “it could be worse. Jake could have drowned, too.” The panic faded a fraction. “And it was amazing that my brothers and friends could fly out.” Yes, this was definitely working. What else? “Um, and Tony would be so proud of how the boys are coping. When I think about it, this whole situation could be so much worse. We’re really very lucky.”  She relaxed into a beam of approval, and I basked in its warmth. Already I could picture her reporting this conversation to others – “Isn’t she brave?” – and anticipated their awed admiration. I learned to reel my blessings off by rote, even if the idea that I felt fortunate was demonstrably farcical.  It did, however, feel like a helpful pretence for two small, bewildered boys too young to know that parents do not routinely die at random. The only way I could see to help them make sense of their inexplicable loss was to impress upon them its rarity. Over and over, I assured Jake and Joe that the world was not normally like this. Nothing like this would ever happen to them again. I did not tell them that Tony’s death had plunged us into insolvency; that he had neglected to update the will he made in the 90s, which left everything he owned to his first wife. They had nothing to fear from the future, I told them; we were still a lucky family. When we reached the first anniversary of Tony’s death, everyone told me the same thing. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind. We had survived the worst year of our lives; whatever the future brought, nothing would ever be this bad again.  Looking back now, my trust in some sort of mythical cosmic calculation seems almost childlike in its naivety. Luck, by definition, does not come with a quota. Yet I still believed in the inevitability of normality when I woke one morning late last June. A friend was throwing a summer party that evening, five days after the first anniversary of Tony’s burial, and the timing seemed serendipitous. After a year of mourning, there would be party dresses, and cocktails, canapes and laughter. I stepped into the shower and my hand brushed across my right breast. The lump was unambiguous. I froze. This wasn’t the day when the darkness would lift, but the day I discovered I had breast cancer.  Dismantled by the diagnosis, lost in the unfamiliar vocabulary of oncology, I stumbled through weeks of test after test in a daze of disbelief. At first, there was talk of a lumpectomy, for the tumour was still small. But it proved to be grade three, the most aggressive kind, and closer scrutiny of my family history revealed a genetic inheritance that made a lumpectomy look like an enviable solution. If my mother had died young of breast cancer, and her only sister of ovarian cancer, the geneticists were unequivocal: the only prudent course of action was a double mastectomy. Still I clung to the desperate hope that I might yet be spared chemotherapy, until further tests extinguished this glimmer, too.  Even a negative result for the BRCA gene transpired to be meaningless. Only a quarter of women whose breast cancer is hereditary carry the genetic mutation made famous by Angelina Jolie. My negative result meant only that I had inherited a faulty gene for which no test yet exists.  The revelation that I had, quite literally, been born unlucky came as a curious kind of relief. I hadn’t eaten too much bacon, or too little kale, or drunk too much vodka. It wasn’t my fault. And yet, so irresistible is the allure of agency, I was still willing to blame myself for getting cancer if it meant the cure could also lie within my gift. What I could not have predicted was how many people would assure me this was absolutely true.  Jake listed things making him angry. 1 Joe calling me names. 2 Tony dying. 3 Having to tidy up. 4 Decca getting cancer  When Tony died, no one knew what to say. When I told people I had cancer, everyone knew what I should do. Cannabis oil, I was assured, would magic it away. Failing that, green coffee enemas. Colonic irrigation was a popular suggestion. And had I heard about lemon juice? Someone offered me a rock from an Austrian spa. Just pop it under the warming plate on the Aga, he said, hold it to my skin, and I’d be cancer-free the very next day. Above all – and under the circumstances, this one felt like a tall order – it was imperative to Think Positive. We all want to believe there is a cure for bad luck.  I resolved to try the lot. Then chemotherapy began, and simply getting dressed became laughably ambitious. I spent the large part of six months in bed eating KitKats, watching terrible TV, helpless while my children unravelled around me. Jake’s rage became ungovernable, Joe’s confusion unreachable. I think they used to enjoy a sense of mild difference from their friends; they were from London, they called their parents by their first names instead of Mum and Dad, their father was black. But they now felt exiled from the playground fraternity of shared experience: “I hate it when everyone else is laughing and playing,” Jake explained, “because how can I join in when they’re not thinking about any of the things I’m thinking about?” Jake’s teacher gave him a diary in which to write down all the things that were making him angry. His lists seemed to soothe him, but their poignancy undid me. “1 Joe calling me names. 2 Tony dying. 3 Having to tidy up. 4 Decca getting cancer.”  The boys wanted to understand this mysterious thing called chemotherapy which was making a dead-eyed stranger of their mother, so I brought them with me to hospital for a session. The oncologist looked a little taken aback when Jake unfolded his list of questions and asked: “Where does cancer come from? Why does chemotherapy make my mum tired? Why did it make her hair fall out?” With heartbreaking care, she tried to answer each question, but the explanation the boys sought lay beyond the boundaries of medicine. They wanted to know why this had happened to their family. All I could say was that we were bitterly, unfathomably unlucky. “No one can believe how unlucky we are,” I told them.  But when I overheard Joe tell a friend, “The thing about us is, we’re really unlucky”, I willed my words unsaid, and wept. What I had loved about their father, more than anything, was his dauntless optimism. I would rather die than raise his boys on self-pity, and I worry that a sense of relentless victimhood will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.  I also worry that it will make us toxic. Having moved to Kent just 12 months before Tony drowned, there had been no time to establish an identity before becoming the Dramatic Widow With Cancer – and who would want to make friends with her? How to navigate social introductions has become a perennial problem. At Christmas, I ventured to a local pub with the boys for a Secret Santa gathering, and got talking to an appealing family who had recently moved to the village, too. The conversation seemed to be going quite well, until the inevitable question: “So how have you been finding life here, then?”  If there is an appropriate tone to strike when answering this, I am yet to find it. I cannot bear to present myself as an object of pity before phone numbers have even been exchanged, and the instant imbalance of full disclosure compromises any prospect of a normal friendship evolving. I have tried trotting off a brisk synopsis, but synthetic breeziness makes it sound too far-fetched to be true. An affectation of wry gallows humour – “Well, you’ll never believe this, but guess what…” – might work for a comedy of errors featuring cowboy builders and nightmare new neighbours, but makes me look like a lunatic. An emotionally truthful account is therefore both imperative and impossibly elusive: even if I could work out how to word one, it would feel like bad manners. Casual chat at the school gate cannot be expected to bear its weight, and I don’t want to embarrass people away when I’m trying to make friends.  I doubt I could have predicted a single one of these dimensions of misfortune before it struck. I would certainly never have guessed the greatest revelation the last two years have brought. Until everything goes wrong, one cannot possibly know the astonishing kindness of the universe. I have spent most of my life aspiring to perfect autonomy, but helplessness cast us on the mercy of others, without which we would not have survived. If my children have learned anything, it is that their world is full of people who love them, and perhaps this is a more precious lesson than any promise of good luck. Every day we have been the beneficiaries of generosity I never dreamed could exist.  I always wanted to give my children a perfect childhood. Now I find myself asking why. If one common theme unites the most captivating people I know, it is a childhood conspicuous for its absence of mundane serenity. Tony was living proof of it. On the night of his funeral, I sat up late with an old friend. Her father, a West Indian musician and decidedly colourful character, had died recently, and as we swapped stories about the unexpected comedies of bereavement – the complicated caravan of multiple girlfriends at her father’s deathbed, the small cannabis factory I discovered in one of our barns after Tony died, the necessity of booking a discreet bouncer for his funeral in case a fight broke out – we fell about laughing.  “But you know,” she reflected wistfully, “my children have a really lovely life. And sometimes I wonder if the spice of my own childhood isn’t something I’ll be sorry they never get to taste.” Perhaps there is a price to pay for vanilla perfection. Perhaps my family has been blessed, after all.  Chemotherapy came to an end in November. In December I underwent a double mastectomy. The treatment is now complete, and the doctors tell me my prospects are good. Unless I am very unlucky, I will live. I hope, of course, to be lucky. But I’m not sure I would conjure my old assumption of good fortune back, even if I could, for it looks like hubris to me now.  • All At Sea by Decca Aitkenhead is published by Fourth Estate at £16.99. To order a copy for £12.99, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846.
When Decca Aitkenhead’s partner, Tony, died rescuing their son from a riptide, she believed she had survived the worst time of her life. But there was more to come