From the Archives: Stephen Teap a year on from his wife's death: ‘It can’t end on a negative note’
Stephen Teap, whose wife Irene died from cervical cancer, with sons Noah and Oscar. Photograph: Michael MacSweeney/Provision"Noah was born on that tile there in a home birth – it's a lovely memory and I'll tell him in time," says Stephen Teap."But it's a house of mixed emotions because while he was born on that tile, in the room overhead Irene died two years later. So it's a house that's seen both ends of the life, the beginning and the end.
“We just clicked from the word ‘go’,” he recalls. “We started going out in April and fell madly in love and all of that and the next thing she was dropping out of college and coming with me to Australia.” Irene, Stephen says, was a fighter, and insisted on sourcing breast milk from other women for Noah while going through radiotherapy and chemotherapy.
Then on July 14th of last year, doctors said there was nothing more they could do for Irene, and that she only had a few weeks to live. Less than a fortnight later, Irene died.“We hoped to get to the end of the summer. Irene wanted to see Oscar start primary school at the end of August, that was her goal, that’s what she set herself,” he says.
“We were driving past the graveyard in Douglas one day and Oscar says, ‘Dad, really old people die?’ and I say ‘Yeah’ and then he said, ‘And really sick people die too, don’t they?’ And I say ‘Yeah’, so I had the opportunity to take it to the next level then, so I said, ‘You know your mum is sick?’ “And I felt sad for Irene because when she was told that she had only weeks to live, she just wanted to live long enough to see Oscar start school, and she missed out on that milestone that she really wanted to see. All that was passing through my head that morning at school.”
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