An "amazing" man died soon after his birthday when a headache like a "sinus infection" turned out to be a brain tumour.
Karen James, 40, met her husband Paul in student halls at Aberystwyth University, where she studied biology and he was training to be an accountant. Karen, originally from Bootle, said: "He was on the ground floor, I was on the second floor. It was university, so you make friends and then it was around November or December in first year we actually got together, and then we were together for 19 years.
"He was an amazing man. He was funny and very, very clever, so he could turn his hand to anything. He was an accountant - just before he got unwell, he'd passed his chartered exams. He was doing really well career-wise, and on the other hand, he was fantastic at DIY. He tiled our bathroom, he put in underfloor heating. He had so many good friends, he was a lot of people's best friend."
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Living together in Wales, they wanted to have kids, but when this wasn't possible, they decided to go travelling and discuss plans for the future. In 2018, just before a holiday to Venice - where they almost toppled off a gondola into the canal - Paul started suffering headaches like a "sinus infection".
Karen, a biomedical scientist, told the ECHO: "The only sign was headaches, so we were back and forth to the doctors. He was fine - not fine, he had headaches, but he was still in work. We went to Venice and he still had the headaches and then, yeah, it all went downhill when we came back."
The headaches continued, but Paul, who had "a very strong pain threshold", dismissed the pain and continued "going about his everyday life as normal". They got his eyes tested, but "at that time, it just seemed to be a headache". Karen said: "He'd done Snowdon Marathon the October before, so he was fit, he was well, he never went the doctors.
"He was strong, he wasn't overweight, so we didn't think it was more serious. We just did the usual thing. At the time it wasn't going, I started to think, 'What's causing these headaches?', but I personally didn't think of a brain tumour."
After Paul collapsed at home one morning, he was rushed to A&E and in April 2018 he was diagnosed with a butterfly glioblastoma, a rare brain tumour. Few people survive it for more than two years, even with treatment. Paul's tumour was 6cm, and end of life care was the only option.
Karen's "world fell apart" when Paul died that November, just a month after he turned 37. Karen said: "One minute we were walking around like normal, and then next minute, the only way to describe it is like a bulldozer has just gone through your life."
Almost as soon as Paul had died, Karen, now living on her own for the first time ever, had to deal with a mountain of paperwork, like registering Paul's death and changing the names on utility bills, phone bills and council tax bills, on top of planning a funeral. Karen felt "lost" mid the "blur" of that period.
She said: "Just before Paul passed away, I literally googled 'how to cope when your husband dies young', because I didn't have a clue. My whole life was Paul, I met him when I was 18, and I just didn't know where to start. Then that's where WAY came up."
With more than 4,500 members across the UK, Widowed and Young (WAY) is the only national charity for people aged under 50 when their partner died. The charity, which is marking National Grief Awareness Week from December 2 to 8, offers peer-to-peer support, social events like camping and picnics, and a helpline offering free counselling.
It also gives people practical support with all the admin Karen faced, and with accessing bereavement payments from the government, which Karen hadn't realised she was entitled to. Karen already had "a fantastic support network" of family and friends, but she needed a group of people who'd experienced that kind of loss themselves to feel properly understood. She found that in WAY.
Realising "the grief will never go away", Karen sold their house in Wales and moved to Ormskirk to make herself feel better by making her world bigger. Living on her own for the first time ever since her husband died, Karen doesn't have Paul's DIY skills to help when things break. Now when she has a leak, she can get a flood of advice from the new community she's found in WAY.
Karen said: "I've got so much love for this charity, because I'm not sure I'd be where I am today if it wasn't for them, which sounds quite dramatic, but my whole world had just tumbled and I was lost, and the person who I'd normally go to when I have a big, significant life event - my husband - all of a sudden he was gone."
She added: "Being a widow can feel quite lonely, and I think people really try to understand, but unless you've lived it you don't. Sometimes it's not the big triggers in life. You think it's going to be, but it's the little things- you're sitting at home watching TV and that person you'd usually watch TV with is not there.
"Sometimes it's just having that understanding. Even though we might all be on a different journey, because obviously people die in different ways, there's a common ground there. It's the empathy that you get at WAY, and the non-judgement. There's no judgement at all."
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