What it feels like living in the shadow of a first wife whose public cancer battle won the nation’s hearts: The story of the woman who’s set to wed BBC star Rachael Bland’s widower
Like most brides-to-be, Amy Crick is enjoying finalising the details of her wedding, from choosing bouquets for the bridesmaids to selecting the starters and settling on a song for the ‘first dance’.
Input from her fiance, Steve, is most welcome, until he makes the mistake of saying: ‘When Rachael and I got married . . .’
‘Steve’ is broadcast journalist Steve Bland, the widower of Radio 5 Live presenter Rachael Bland, who died in September 2018 after a high-profile battle with breast cancer.
Millions listened to You, Me And The Big C — the podcast she co-presented about living with cancer — and shed tears as she shared the final stages of her journey on social media.
Although hugely supportive and sympathetic to Steve and his young son, Amy also doesn’t want to live in the shadow of his late wife.
Whenever he mentions how he and Rachael organised their big day, she will bluntly tell her husband-to-be: ‘I don’t really need to know the ins and outs of your first wedding.’
‘It doesn’t upset me,’ she adds in her first interview since meeting Steve two years ago.
‘But there are some things that I don’t need to know, which is why I haven’t listened to all of Rachael’s podcasts and — although I have a copy of her autobiography on my bookshelf — I haven’t read it.’
Journalist Steve Bland with his son Freddie, 6, and fiancee Amy Crick
Given that it was written in the final months of Rachael’s life — one she would have given anything to go on living with Steve, her husband for five years, and son Freddie — it’s easy to see why it might make difficult reading for Amy.
‘Mine is a pretty unique situation, not many women have the opportunity to hear the innermost thoughts of their partner’s first wife,’ she says.
‘And, obviously, because Rachael was such an incredible woman, there’s an element of me feeling a bit inadequate by comparison.’
Of course Amy, 38, has nothing to feel inadequate about. The privately-educated daughter of a businessman and stay-at-home mum, raised in Formby, Merseyside, she is an advanced nurse practitioner, specialising in oncology, with numerous academic papers to her name.
It was this shared association with cancer that drew her and Steve together back in November 2019, when he and the other presenters of You, Me And The Big C gave a talk at a conference where she was in the audience.
‘I stopped Steve as he walked past me and said: ‘I think what you’re doing — talking about emotions and grief from a male partner’s perspective — is fantastic’,’ recalls Amy.
‘But then I was hideously embarrassed and sent him a message on social media saying: ‘I do apologise for accosting you’.
‘He found it amusing and we started chatting and got on so well that he asked me out on a date, early that December.’
Later on, they realised they’d actually met briefly in June 2018, when Amy had admitted a ‘very poorly’ Rachael to hospital, three months before her death.
‘Rachael told me she was a journalist for 5 Live and I remember asking Steve if he was a journalist, too,’ recalls Amy.
Radio 5 Live presenter Rachael Bland (pictured), died in September 2018 after a high-profile battle with breast cancer.
‘He just said: ‘Yeah’. And then put his head back down to look at his laptop.’
In defence of his brusque response, Steve says: ‘At that time I was trying to hold on to my job and Rachael was getting dragged into hospital all the time, so I’d often sit in the side wards, trying to work.’
While most people would recognise how hard it was for Steve, 41, to be dating again, 15 months after his wife’s death, coming into his life has obviously caused challenges for Amy, too.
‘My mum was worried when I told her because it was only just over a year since Steve had lost Rachael,’ she says.
‘I explained that, something I know from my work, with a terminal illness you start grieving a loved one long before they die.
‘If I’d met Steve a few years earlier, it probably would have felt a bit too heavy. But when you get to your mid-30s there’s going to be some sort of baggage — be that an ex-wife or a wife that’s passed away.’
Given that Rachael had a public profile, inevitably there was also wider interest in Steve’s new girlfriend.
Amy says: ‘People have a view about when a widower should start dating again and I remember seeing something online saying that Steve was going out with a ‘Rachael lookalike’, which is a compliment, because she was very beautiful, but also ridiculous as the only resemblance is that we’re both female, with dyed blonde hair.’
Sometimes the responses have been tougher to deal with, however. On Freddie’s birthday last September, Steve posted pictures of himself with Amy and his son on Instagram.
Steve’s emotional social media post revealing the passing of his wife Rachael in 2018
He recalls: ‘Most people were really lovely about it but there were two or three who said: ‘I think it’s really awful that you haven’t posted a picture of Rachael’ and ‘This is really terrible, really disrespectful’.
‘I didn’t take it well, I bit back and said: ‘This really has got nothing to do with you’.
‘Then on Rachael’s birthday last month I got messages from random people saying: ‘Why have you not posted on social media about Rachael’s birthday?’ But it’s hard, because I know that some of those dates are quite tough for Amy and she’s the present, where I am now.
‘Also, just because you don’t put up a post, it doesn’t mean that you’re not thinking about someone.’
If dealing with public judgment has sometimes been tricky, there have been hurdles to cross closer to home.
They were a few months into their relationship, and both confident it could go the distance, before Amy popped round one evening for pizza with Steve and Freddie, who is now six.
With twin nieces of the same age, Amy happily got on the floor with him to build Lego, draw and colour.
‘Of course the more involved I’ve become in his life the more conscious I am of helping raise Freddie in a way that Rachael would have done,’ Amy says.
Rachael died days before Freddie’s third birthday.
‘I wouldn’t want her looking down thinking: ‘That’s a terrible decision!’
‘I feel a bigger sense of responsibility than I would raising my own child.
‘Rachael would have done anything to bring up her own son and I know how lucky I am that I’ve got my health and I’ve got Steve and Freddie in my life.’
It certainly helps knowing that among Rachael’s dying wishes were for Steve and Freddie to be happy and for her son to have a ‘mother figure’.
As for Freddie, Steve says that he ‘absolutely adores’ Amy.
Then there’s Rachael’s mum, Gayna, who remains a hugely important figure in their lives and was one of the first people Steve told when he started dating Amy.
Due to Covid restrictions, it was May 2020 before they could make the trip to her home in Wales.
‘Some people might have found it quite difficult because, understandably, she talked about Rachael the whole time but I love hearing stories about her,’ says Amy.
‘She remembered Rachael saying that she’d had ‘a really nice nurse’ on the day I admitted her to hospital and told me I was ‘heaven-sent’.
‘I’m really glad that thought brings Gayna comfort.’
Gayna was then one of the first people to hear their happy news after Steve popped the question on a four-day trip to Copenhagen last November.
Steve had hinted he would propose before the year was out and Amy was getting impatient.
‘Lying in our hotel room bed, control freak that I am, I said: ‘If you’re going to propose, please don’t do it at Christmas in front of people because I would hate it. It would be so cheesy’,’ recalls Amy.
‘When I turned around Steve was on one knee on the floor, with the ring in his hand, saying: ‘Well, shall we just do it now then?’
Confident that Amy would say yes, Steve had ordered the large oval diamond set in a diamond-encrusted band, and told Amy’s parents and Freddie of his plans before leaving for Copenhagen.
‘Gayna sent an incredibly generous message saying how happy she was and how Rachael would be happy for us and that she knew we would keep Rachael’s memory alive, at a time when probably a part of her felt a deep sadness that I couldn’t even begin to comprehend,’ says Amy.
Gayna’s was also one of the first names they added to the list of 90 guests invited to their wedding, to be held in a rustic converted barn in rural Cheshire in August.
Meanwhile, the couple are conscious of the impact their marriage will have on Freddie’s life.
Each having sold their house, they are now looking to buy a larger family home in Knutsford, Cheshire, where Steve currently lives — 30 miles from Amy’s home in Formby — so the little boy doesn’t have to endure the upheaval of moving schools.
‘We’re both very aware of the milestones Freddie is going to go through this year so we’re making sure we have lots of cuddles and conversations with him about how we’re all feeling,’ Amy says.
Freddie, alongside Steve’s closest friend — who performed the same role at his wedding to Rachael — will be one of the best men on the big day.
Although Amy would have been happy with a small register office ceremony, Steve is a fan of huge weddings; his first a grand affair at Llangoed Hall, a historic country house hotel in Brecon.
‘Steve and Rachael’s wedding was very fancy whereas I’m not a very formal person, so we’ve found a compromise we’re both happy with,’ says Amy.
Steve and Amy must also decide how to honour Rachael in their new life together.
Steve and Rachael’s wedding photographs, which used to take pride of place in Steve’s living room, have been given less prominence in recent months. He felt it was unfair to force Amy to look at pictures of him smiling happily with another woman.
Still, they are determined that Rachael’s fears about ending up as a mere ‘footnote’ in Steve’s life will never be realised. ‘In our new house we’ll have a room where we can have nice pictures of Freddie and Rachael, and Rachael on her own,’ says Amy.
‘I think it’s really important for Freddie because she will always be his mum. I also have huge respect for her as a woman, for what she achieved, and want her presence to be with us forever.’
Steve credits his fiancee’s openness and honesty about her feelings with making the whole process much easier than it otherwise might have been.
Whenever she has been introduced to Rachael’s friends, including co-presenter of You, Me And The Big C Deborah James, Amy always brings Rachael into the conversation, determined that her predecessor will never be ‘the elephant in the room’.
She is also in touch online with other women in her position and says she’s often asked for advice, to which she says: ‘I’m afraid there’s no Dummies Guide to dating widowers.’
Thankfully Steve’s family have welcomed her wholeheartedly.
After the family got together to mark the second anniversary of Rachael’s death in September 2020, Amy was incredibly touched when Steve received a message from his dad saying: ‘We’ll always love Rachael but we love Amy, too.’
The couple would very much like to extend their family, though Amy says they will have to wait until after the wedding as ‘there’s no room in my dress for a bump’.
And, although they’re both delighted to have found one another, they’re also realistic about the challenges married life will present, not least because, while Amy is a minimalist, Steve admits to being a bit of a hoarder.
‘Steve is the first man I’ve felt I want to be with forever,’ says Amy. ‘But he’s also a man and I’m a woman, which means we’re very different and, inevitably, at times we don’t get on. In fact, when he’s really doing my head in, I look to the sky and think: ‘Rachael, do you sympathise?’
While Steve’s friends tell him he is ‘punching above his weight’ with Amy — just as he did with Rachael — Amy has another take on it.
‘I tell him he’s hit the jackpot twice,’ she says, laughing.
And, while Rachael Bland’s were undoubtedly big shoes to fill, after spending a couple of hours with this beautiful, warm, funny, feisty, intelligent woman, it’s hard to imagine anyone would disagree with that.
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