Unbreakable: My life with Paul – a story of extraordinary courage and love

Unbreakable: My life with Paul – a story of extraordinary courage and love
Lindsey Hunter

Unbreakable tells Lindsey Hunter’s moving and heartbreaking story. Lindsey is the widow of snooker star Paul Hunter, who died tragically aged only 27 in October 2006 after a battle with cancer, leaving Lindsey and their one year-old daughter Evie bereft and alone.Lindsey met Paul Hunter when she was 21 and he was 18. When they married seven years later, Paul had become a golden boy in the world of snooker, dubbed ‘the Beckham of the baize,’ having won the Masters trophy three times, and attained a world ranking of number four, and Lindsey's happiness looked assured. But tragedy struck when Paul was diagnosed with a rare type of cancer, neuro-endocrine tumours in his abdomen.Aggressive chemotherapy appeared to work, and within six months Paul was competing in a major championship, with Lindsey cheering him on from the side-lines. More joy came when Lindsey gave birth to their daughter, Evie Rose. But tragically, Paul died in October 2006, 18 months after his diagnosis, leaving Lindsey a widow and single mother.Lindsey was determined to celebrate Paul's life rather than mourn his death, and has dealt with the loss of her young husband on the beginning of their life together with strength and courage, for the sake of their daughter.This is not just a heartbreaking and inspirational story about LIndsey and Paul’s unbreakable love but a testimony to one of the greatest sportsmen the snooker world has ever seen.

Lindsey Hunter

Unbreakable

My life with Paul

A story of extraordinary courage and love

To Evie

I’ll never forget your daddy and the love we shared, but you are my future …

Make your own way, my darling daughter.

Love Mummy xxx

Contents

Title Page (#u6335b4ef-5353-5437-9e81-f7526c848b5a)Prologue: March (#udebb3a7b-e6bb-57e5-a4b9-0db977ab7929)Chapter One: Twenty Three March (#u549601eb-d1ca-5674-8b78-8f0536a0c3d1)Chapter Two: March (#u912763c8-7d25-59d6-a3dd-4c5e91a889c6)Chapter Three: Making An Impression (#uff021b48-9f2a-5b72-97b9-1bd2f9f434ad)Chapter Four: Golden Boy (#u5e6344e5-0289-5328-8c6b-e2db54ddcfd2)Chapter Five: Summer (#u6d475b85-f65b-5284-9383-41daa792021e)Chapter Six: Summer Love (#u387a3664-8971-576e-b4ce-1e3be02c9b15)Chapter Seven: My World (#u9f267658-2360-5959-ad4c-0a4f33493bba)Chapter Eight: Which Girlfriend? (#u019676a9-d0d0-5e01-9ce0-31885ed58821)Chapter Nine: The Lost Years (#u0865fe28-1494-568f-b996-fa675137dc08)Chapter Ten: Polishing The Diamond (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Eleven: Plan B (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twelve: Engaged (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirteen: Wedding Plans (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Fourteen: Shorter, Tighter, Better! (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Fifteen: Mr And Mrs Paul Hunter (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Sixteen: D Day (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Seventeen: Reality (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Eighteen: ‘Your Husband’s Got Cancer’ (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Nineteen: Dread (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty: Life Goes On (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty-One: The Battle Begins (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty-Two: A Ray Of Hope (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty-Three: Chemo Countdown (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty-Four: ‘Little Paul’ (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty-Five: For Better, For Worse (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty-Six: Our Baby (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty-Seven: What’s The Sex? (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty-Eight: Normal (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty-Nine: Hard Labour (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty: Hello, Evie Rose (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty-One: A Perfect Family (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty-Two: Wishing For Miracles (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty-Three: Father Christmas (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty-Four: Summer (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty-Five: Letting Go (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty-Six: Goodbye, My Love (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty-Seven: Paul’s Legacy (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty-Eight: Life Goes On (#litres_trial_promo)Epilogue: Dear Paul – (#litres_trial_promo)Appendix: Letters For Paul (#litres_trial_promo)Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

Prologue (#u61c6b53a-345a-53b3-83fd-95cdbaaa57a2)

March 2007 (#u61c6b53a-345a-53b3-83fd-95cdbaaa57a2)

The first time I saw Paul Hunter, he was 18 and I was 21. I needed a lift into town for a night out, and a friend said, ‘My little cousin will drive us in.’ I got into his blue sports car and my first impression was, ‘He’s just a kid.’ His cousin said he was a snooker player, and I asked, ‘As a job? That’s not a real job – that’s a hobby!’

The last time I saw Paul Hunter, he was 27 and I was 31. By then, he was my husband and the father of our baby daughter. We’d had the world at our feet for years, but it was slipping away fast. Paul was lying in a bed in a Huddersfield hospice, ravaged and exhausted, finally giving up his 18-month fight with cancer. I held his hand and said, ‘It’s time to go, darling. Just close your eyes.’

This is the story of everything that lay between those two events: the love and the laughter; the glitter and the fame; the pain and the fear; the terror and the loss. It’s a story that doesn’t end with death, that doesn’t end because one of us is no longer here. It’s a story about love …

It wasn’t love at first sight. Not for either of us. When I first met Paul Hunter he was just a daft boy. He had too much time on his hands, too little structure in his life, and too many people telling him he was God’s gift. Yet he had that smile. I can see it, feel it, even now. There was a magic about him that seemed to make him shine from the inside out. It wasn’t just his looks – although he was gorgeous, with floppy blond hair, sparkly green eyes and a cheeky grin. It wasn’t just his success – although by the time I met him he was well on the way to fame and fortune. It was the way he charmed everyone he met, from old ladies to lads in the pub, to shopkeepers and taxi drivers. He didn’t have a bad bone in his body.

I have so many beautiful memories. The best one of all is the living, breathing one I’m holding in my arms right now: Evie Rose, our baby girl. Paul and I ended up loving each other so much that there just had to be concrete proof, and I’m looking at her. As I sit here in an almost empty house getting ready to move, surrounded by packing cases and boxes, of course I grieve for all the happy times I spent here with Paul, but I won’t be broken by the memories of them.

Paul knew how to live; and he packed more into his few short years on earth than most people do in a lifetime. He made people happy. He made me happy. I could sit here in tears – and goodness knows there are plenty of times I feel like it. Who wouldn’t grieve for a husband torn away from them after only two years of marriage? Who wouldn’t feel their heart had been ripped out after 18 months spent watching him dragged to hell and back by terminal cancer?

I think these things sitting on the floor. I realize by Evie’s whimperings that I’m holding her too tightly, rocking back and forward a bit too frantically. She’ll never know her daddy, and he’ll never know what she grows up to be, but I won’t condemn her to life with a mother who only lives in the past.

I’m going to take the devotion that Paul gave me and shower our daughter with it. I’m going to teach her to be strong and fill her up with so much love that she will be able to take on the world one day. I’ll tell her all about her dad and make her proud to be his daughter – and she in turn will form part of his amazing, unique legacy.

Chapter One (#u61c6b53a-345a-53b3-83fd-95cdbaaa57a2)

23 March 2005 (#u61c6b53a-345a-53b3-83fd-95cdbaaa57a2)

It was a beautiful early spring morning. I got up, showered, got dressed, just as I would on any other day. I shouted to my husband Paul to get up too as I went downstairs to make breakfast. He was quite quick that morning, given that he could usually sleep for England. I glanced at him as he stumbled into the kitchen, long blond hair flopping over his eyes. We’d been married almost a year, together for a lot longer, and I still got a flutter every time I looked at him – my husband!

My husband was Paul Hunter.

My husband was one of the best snooker players in the entire world.

He was famous and loved and recognized – but to me, none of that mattered when he came home at night, when the rest of the world wasn’t there.

He was just the man of my dreams.

I absolutely adored him.

He came over to me behind the breakfast bar of our Leeds home and grabbed a bacon sarnie off the plate, kissing me as he did it. ‘Come on then,’ he said. ‘Let’s be going, Linz.’

I pulled him towards me as he headed for the door. ‘Paul,’ I began, ‘Whatever happens …’

He cut me off. ‘It’ll be fine, Linz. Everything will be fine. You’ve said so yourself often enough.’ With that he smiled, picked up the keys to his BMW and we headed out of the door.

It took over an hour to get there, park, and make our way inside. The sign on the wall will mean lots of things to lots of different people: St James’ University Hospital, commonly known to locals as Jimmy’s. They might be there to have a baby, to get their broken leg fixed, to see their granny – a thousand reasons, each one so important to the person experiencing it. We didn’t know what we were going to hear but, as always, I had a plan. If I prepared myself for the worst, I thought nothing could surprise me, nothing could knock me off course.

I’d already had my shock. The one that took us there. Only a couple of weeks earlier, Paul became concerned about a pain in his side. The worry was that he might be heading for a burst appendix. God, we thought, how awful would that be? But it wasn’t his appendix; it was a lump. That day, in Jimmy’s, one of the largest oncology centres in Europe, we were to find out whether our life could move on. There was still a bit of me that was surprised we were even in an ‘oncology’ centre. I wouldn’t have known what the word meant until this all started. I know now. I know the definition: it’s the branch of medicine that deals with tumours, including the study of their development, diagnosis, treatment and prevention.

The branch of medicine that deals with the word we all fear.

Cancer.

We walked towards the NHS waiting room and I think I was probably shaking, but it was hard to tell because Paul was shaking so much more. There was peeling paper on the walls, ancient magazines on the tables, and a coffee machine that no one was risking. The waiting room was busy. It felt old, as if no one had put any care into it for years and that made me cross. People who sit waiting there are going through a very bad time in their lives. Couldn’t it have been nicer? Couldn’t it have been fresh and clean and pretty? I knew I was trying to distract myself.

Paul and I were holding hands. Tightly. Sometimes I ran my hand over the top of his, back and forth. Sometimes I squeezed his fingers and smiled when he looked at me. Sometimes I gave him a little kiss on the cheek. It was all meant to comfort – but why was I trying to comfort him if everything was going to be all right?

I wanted it to be over and done with so that we could get on with our lives, be together until we were old. Another part of me didn’t want to move, didn’t want time to tick by. If the news was bad, I knew everything would be broken from the moment we were told.

There were people of all ages, all types, beside us. Every so often, someone nodded towards Paul, or smiled, or hesitantly said ‘Hiya’. He didn’t know these people and I wondered whether they recognized him as the snooker player from the telly or if there was just some sort of automatic friendship between people waiting to hear if they had cancer or not?

‘You’ll be fine, babes,’ I said. Again.

I’d been saying it for two weeks, ever since he first got the pain in his side. I said it in the middle of the night when he woke up in a cold sweat. I said it when he came back from doing an interview in which he talked about the future. I said it to everyone else, and I said it to myself.

This was D Day. We’d staggered through the last two weeks, trying to be a normal couple, trying to forget what was going to happen that day, but we couldn’t ignore it any longer. There was only one thought going through my mind: PLEASE LET EVERYTHING BE OK.

Paul walked into the consulting room and I followed. We sat down and went through the usual pleasantries, constantly aware of the folder on the doctor’s desk. I tried to read things upside down, tried to read the body language of the consultant. Then the reality hit me. I actually heard what he was saying.

I had prepared myself for the worst and it happened.

Those words were being said.

Paul had cancer.

Chapter Two (#u61c6b53a-345a-53b3-83fd-95cdbaaa57a2)

March 1997 (#u61c6b53a-345a-53b3-83fd-95cdbaaa57a2)