Debbie McGee’s romance with late husband Paul Daniels was filled with as much magic as their sparkling stage act.
So when the magician died following a battle with brain cancer in 2016, aged 77, the loss to wife and assistant Debbie was unbearable.
After such a high-profile relationship, there was no hope of her being able to grieve in private – but she says this actually helped her through the heartache of losing her husband of 28 years.
Speaking to Loose Women star Coleen Nolan on Reach’s Let’s Talk About Grief podcast, Debbie says simple acts of kindness from well-wishers meant the world to her during that time.
She explains: “People said to me, ‘What’s it like being in the public eye and going through it? It must be awful’. And I said, ‘No, it’s the opposite’. When you’re somebody who nobody knows, you walk around with your grief inside and they don’t know why you’re being grumpy or sad. But when you’re in the public eye, they know what you’re going through.
“People weren’t intrusive, but particularly women would just come up to me and give me a hug and walk away.
“They didn’t say anything and it meant so much.
“Because the first couple of years, that pain inside you is so strong that you put on a smiley face and you get on with life.
“But you’re walking around the shops with this huge pain – and I can’t describe it but, you know, kind of in your diaphragm.”
Debbie was also helped by the kindness of neighbours in the village of Wargrave, Berkshire, when she was caring for Paul in his final months. One woman took it upon herself to leave them a cooked meal every day with a note on how to heat it up.
“She knew I had a back door that would be open, so she left a casserole or a big pot of soup and lovely bread on the draining board,” says Debbie.
“If she’d have said, ‘Let me cook dinner for you’, I would have said no. Now what I say to people is, if you know somebody that’s nursing somebody at home, or they’re ill, just do it – just put it on the doorstep.”
Debbie met Paul when she appeared in his 1979 summer show in Great Yarmouth, four years after his divorce from his first wife, with whom he had three sons. She became his regular assistant and starred alongside him on The Paul Daniels Magic Show which was a much-loved fixture on BBC1 from 1979 to 1994.
They wed in 1988 and enjoyed a long and happy marriage, with Paul ensuring the magic never stopped when they left the stage.
One year on her birthday – which falls on Halloween – he surprised her by taking her to Paris.
“He said ‘You have got to be up at seven and you have got to wear something stylish, but with shoes you can walk in’,” she recalls.
“Alright… and this is the end of October. Anyway, he flew me to Paris for lunch for my birthday.”
Ever the joker, Paul took much delight in the fact his birthday was the same as that of legendary magician Harry Houdini, who died on Halloween. Debbie says: “So in the early days, you know, he used to say to people: ‘Oh, I only married her for the publicity. She’s gonna have seances to see if she can get to me because that’s what Houdini’s wife did’.”
In the year after Paul died, Debbie was cloaked in an all-consuming grief.
Now she says she is glad she did not rush into a new relationship at such a vulnerable time.
The TV star – a finalist on Strictly Come Dancing in 2017 – has a strong support network but does not yet have a partner, which is understandable considering Paul was such a hard act to follow
Debbie, 64, tells Mirror columnist Coleen: “I think in the first couple of years after Paul died, I just didn’t realise how vulnerable I was because suddenly your support blanket is gone.
“It’s not that you want to meet a partner, you just feel like you need that security.
“I think if I’d met somebody, I probably could have really easily got into the wrong relationship, which has happened to quite a few of my friends. And I’m just glad I didn’t because now I’m six-and-a-half years down the line I’m very kind of content in my world. If suddenly I meet somebody and there is chemistry, that would be fantastic. But I’m not really looking for it.”
Thinking back over the early days of her loss, she says: “It’s such a strange thing, that first year, every time I had to come back to the house on my own. It was awful. Nothing will take it away.”
It hurts just as much now, but she tries not to think about Paul too much so as not to get upset all the time.
She says: “You know, your grief is getting easier by that pain not being there 24 hours.
“Then you start to feel guilty that you’ve kind of put it out of your mind for an hour.”
“If I wanted to, I could sit here and talk to you and cry my eyes out. I could bring images of Paul to me. I know not to go there in my head because I know as soon as I do that the floodgates open.
“I still will cry like I did the day he died. It’s OK sometimes but you don’t want to do that every single day.”
Instead, Debbie thinks about how their relationship enriched her life.
“I had a fairytale marriage and I had a man that loved me completely unconditionally, that I really knew,” she says. “And since he’s died, I found out more things that proved how much he loved me.
“So why should I actually just live and dwell in my sadness of losing him? Because I actually had nearly 40 years of loving him.”
Let's Talk About Grief is a Reach production brought to you by Co-op Funeralcare and is available now on all major podcast providers.
